Young Children's Word Learning Research Articles

A processing advantage in favor of animate entities in incidental word learning in young children

Because of their evolutionary importance, it has been proposed that animate entities would be better remembered than inanimate entities. Although a growing body of evidence supports this hypothesis, it is still unclear whether the animacy effect persists under incidental learning conditions. Furthermore, few studies have tested the robustness of this effect in young children, with conflicting results. Using an incidental learning paradigm, we investigated whether young children (4- and 5-year-olds) would be better at learning words that refer to either human or animal entities rather than vehicle entities using pictures as stimuli. A sample of 79 children were asked to play digital Memory games while associations between pictures and words were presented incidentally. Consistent with the adaptive view of memory, the results showed that words associated with human and animal entities were better learned incidentally than words associated with vehicle entities. The visual complexity of the pictures did not influence this animacy effect. In addition, the more exposure to the pictures, the more incidental learning occurred. Overall, the results confirm the robustness of the animacy effect and show that this processing advantage can be found in an incidental learning task in children as young as 4 or 5 years. Furthermore, it is the first study to show that this effect can be obtained with pictures in children. The demonstration of the animacy effect with pictures, and not just words, is a prerequisite for an ultimate explanation of this effect in terms of survival.

The Relation Between Attention, Inhibition and Word Learning in Young Children

In their natural environments, children usually see several novel objects while they hear the labels for these objects, making it difficult for them to know exactly which objects these words refer to. This referential ambiguity problem can be alleviated through selective attention and inhibitory control because a child who focuses on plausible referents while inhibiting irrelevant ones during object labelling has a higher chance of identifying the intended referent. The present study examined this hypothesis by testing 3.5- to 4.5-year-old children. In particular, we examined the links between children’s word learning (a cross-situational learning task), selective attention (flanker task), inhibitory control (day-night Stroop task) while controlling for working memory (Corsi block task). We found that children learned the novel word-object associations and completed the cognitive control tasks successfully. However, we did not find any association between word learning and cognitive control or memory span. We argue that the lack of a significant association between cognitive control and word learning may be indicative of a more exploratory style of learning in young children.

Analogical inference from distributional structure: What recurrent neural networks can tell us about word learning

One proposal that can explain the remarkable pace of word learning in young children is that they leverage the language-internal distributional similarity of familiar and novel words to make analogical inferences about possible meanings of novel words (Lany and Gómez, 2008; Lany and Saffran, 2011; Savic et al., 2022b; Unger and Fisher, 2021; Wojcik and Saffran, 2015). However, a cognitively and developmentally plausible computational account of how language-internal lexical representations are acquired to enable this kind of analogical inference has not been previously investigated. In this work, we tested the feasibility of using the SRN (Elman, 1990) as the supplier of language-internal representations for use in analogical inference. While the SRN is in many ways well suited to this task, we discuss several theoretical challenges that might limit its success. In a series of simulations with controlled artificial languages and the CHILDES corpus, we show that Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) are prone to acquiring ‘entangled’ lexical semantic representations, where some features of a word are partially encoded in the representations of other frequently co-occurring words. However, we also show that this problem is mitigated when RNNs are first trained on language input to young children, due to the fact that its distributional structure more reliably predicts semantic category membership of individual words. Overall, our work sheds light on the conditions under which RNNs organize their learned knowledge so that word-level information can be more easily extracted and used in downstream processes, such as word learning.

Effects of face masks on novel word learning in preschool children

Face masks worn by talkers compromise the speech signal children use to learn language. There is debate, however, about which type of face mask will be more supportive of language learning in young children. Although clear masks provide more visual access to the talker’s face than surgical masks, they distort the speech signal more than surgical masks. Our goal is to better understand the effects of different face masks on word learning in preschool-age and kindergarten-age children. To achieve this goal, we are comparing children’s ability to learn novel words in conditions that vary on the spectral fidelity of speech and visual access to the talker’s face to simulate the effects of different mask types. Children’s performance is quantified by the number of words learned and the phonological precision of words learned. To date, twelve children have completed the protocol, and the study is ongoing. We will compare children’s word-learning across conditions and evaluate the influence of individual factors such as visual speech reading skills, verbal working memory, and vocabulary knowledge on children’s performance in the various conditions. These findings will have implications for supporting word learning in young children in educational and childcare settings when masks are used.

Pragmatics aid referent disambiguation and word learning in young children and adults.

How do children succeed in learning a word? Research has shown robustly that, in ambiguous labeling situations, young children assume novel labels to refer to unfamiliar rather than familiar objects. However, ongoing debates center on the underlying mechanism: Is this behavior based on lexical constraints, guided by pragmatic reasoning, or simply driven by children's attraction to novelty? Additionally, recent research has questioned whether children's disambiguation leads to long-term learning or rather indicates an attentional shift in the moment of the conversation. Thus, we conducted a pre-registered online study with 2- and 3-year-olds and adults. Participants were presented with unknown objects as potential referents for a novel word. Across conditions, we manipulated whether the only difference between both objects was their relative novelty to the participant or whether, in addition, participants were provided with pragmatic information that indicated which object the speaker referred to. We tested participants' immediate referent selection and their retention after 5min. Results revealed that when given common ground information both age groups inferred the correct referent with high success and enhanced behavioral certainty. Without this information, object novelty alone did not guide their selection. After 5min, adults remembered their previous selections above chance in both conditions, while children only showed reliable learning in the pragmatic condition. The pattern of results indicates how pragmatics may aid referent disambiguation and learning in both adults and young children. From early ontogeny on, children's social-cognitive understanding may guide their communicative interactions and support their language acquisition. RESEARCH HIGHLIGHTS: We tested how 2-3-year-olds and adults resolve referential ambiguity without any lexical cues. In the pragmatic context both age groups disambiguated novel word-object-mappings, while object novelty alone did not guide their referent selection. In the pragmatic context, children also showed increased certainty in disambiguation and retained new word-object-mappings over time. These findings contribute to the ongoing debate on whether children learn words on the basis of domain-specific constraints, lower-level associative mechanisms, or pragmatic inferences.

English-learning preschoolers can correctly parse and interpret negative sentences to guide their interpretations of novel noun and verb meanings

ABSTRACT We studied English-learning children’s ability to learn the meanings of novel words from sentences containing truth-functional negation (Exp1) and to use the semantics of negation to inform word meaning (Exp2). In Exp1, 22-month-olds (n = 21) heard dialogues introducing a novel verb in either negative-transitive (“Mary didn’t blick the baby”) or negative-intransitive (“Mary didn’t blick”) sentences. When then asked to “Find blicking!” while viewing two-participant versus one-participant actions, children who heard negative-transitive sentences looked longer at the two-participant event than children who heard negative-intransitives. Thus, the mere presence of negation does not disrupt sentence processing and word learning in young children. Experiment 2 tested whether 2-to-4-year-olds (n = 20) use the semantics of negation to restrict the meaning of novel nouns when categorizing objects varying along a perceptual continuum (from 10 to 90% exemplars). Children initially heard “These are blickets” paired with certain exemplars (e.g., yellowish creatures, exemplars 10 and 30%). They then saw additional exemplars (e.g., pinkish creatures, 70 and 90%) while hearing either “These are not blickets” (negative condition) or “These are also blickets” (affirmative condition). At test, when seeing two novel exemplars from the continuum (e.g., creatures 20 and 80%) and asked to find “a blicket,” children in the negative condition selected the exemplar from the bottom of the continuum (i.e., the 20%) more often than children in the affirmative condition. Thus, English-learning children as young as 22-months of age correctly parse negative sentences and 2-to-4-year-olds can use negation to understand the boundaries of a word’s meaning.

Flexible fast-mapping: Deaf children dynamically allocate visual attention to learn novel words in American Sign Language.

Word learning in young children requires coordinated attention between language input and the referent object. Current accounts of word learning are based on spoken language, where the association between language and objects occurs through simultaneous and multimodal perception. In contrast, deaf children acquiring American Sign Language (ASL) perceive both linguistic and non-linguistic information through the visual mode. In order to coordinate attention to language input and its referents, deaf children must allocate visual attention optimally between objects and signs. We conducted two eye-tracking experiments to investigate how young deaf children allocate attention and process referential cues in order to fast-map novel signs to novel objects. Participants were deaf children learning ASL between the ages of 17 and 71 months. In Experiment 1, participants (n=30) were presented with a novel object and a novel sign, along with a referential cue that occurred either before or after the sign label. In Experiment 2, a new group of participants (n=32) were presented with two novel objects and a novel sign, so that the referential cue was critical for identifying the target object. Across both experiments, participants showed evidence for fast-mapping the signs regardless of the timing of the referential cue. Individual differences in children's allocation of attention during exposure were correlated with their ability to fast-map the novel signs at test. This study provides first evidence for fast-mapping in sign language, and contributes to theoretical accounts of how word learning develops when all input occurs in the visual modality.

That’s hard! Item difficulty and word characteristics for bilinguals with and without developmental language disorder

ABSTRACT Research has investigated how lexical-semantic and participant factors impact word learning in young children and adults. However, limited information pertaining to expressive vocabulary development exists for school-aged bilinguals—particularly those with developmental language disorder (DLD). Cross-linguistic differences in the semantic characteristics of words may impact the types of cues available for constructing expressive vocabulary knowledge. To address this gap, we evaluated the relationships between intrinsic factors (age, language ability), extrinsic factors (L1 exposure), and word characteristics (e.g. imageability, concreteness) with item difficulty and expressive vocabulary knowledge in school-aged Spanish-English bilinguals with and without DLD. While we found similar patterns of associations between item difficulty and word characteristics across language ability groups, divergent predictive patterns emerged across languages and across ability groups. Educators supporting the development of bilingual students’ expressive vocabulary knowledge must account for not only cultural differences across students, but also characteristics inherent to words.

Two-year-olds consolidate verb meanings during a nap

Successful word learning requires establishing an initial representation that is sufficiently robust to be retained in memory. Sleep has profound advantages for memory consolidation, but evidence concerning the effects of sleep in young children's word learning is slim and focuses almost exclusively on learning nouns. Verbs are representationally more complex and are often learned from non-concurrent linguistic and observational information (e.g., hearing “let's pour your milk” before the pouring event takes place). What remains unknown is whether initial representations built this way are robust enough to sustain a delay, and how these representations are affected by sleep. We presented two-year-olds with non-concurrent linguistic and observational information about novel verbs and immediately tested their knowledge of the verbs' meanings by evaluating their eye gaze as they looked at potential referents. Then, after a 4-hour delay during which half of the children napped and half remained awake, we retested them to see if they remembered the verbs' meanings. The results demonstrate differences in two-year-olds' representations of a novel verb before and after the delay; specifically, their verb representations withstood the 4-hour delay if they had napped, but decayed if they had remained awake.

Consistency of co-occurring actions influences young children's word learning.

Communication with young children is often multimodal in nature, involving, for example, language and actions. The simultaneous presentation of information from both domains may boost language learning by highlighting the connection between an object and a word, owing to temporal overlap in the presentation of multimodal input. However, the overlap is not merely temporal but can also covary in the extent to which particular actions co-occur with particular words and objects, e.g. carers typically produce a hopping action when talking about rabbits and a snapping action for crocodiles. The frequency with which actions and words co-occurs in the presence of the referents of these words may also impact young children’s word learning. We, therefore, examined the extent to which consistency in the co-occurrence of particular actions and words impacted children’s learning of novel word–object associations. Children (18 months, 30 months and 36–48 months) and adults were presented with two novel objects and heard their novel labels while different actions were performed on these objects, such that the particular actions and word–object pairings always co-occurred (Consistent group) or varied across trials (Inconsistent group). At test, participants saw both objects and heard one of the labels to examine whether participants recognized the target object upon hearing its label. Growth curve models revealed that 18-month-olds did not learn words for objects in either condition, and 30-month-old and 36- to 48-month-old children learned words for objects only in the Consistent condition, in contrast to adults who learned words for objects independent of the actions presented. Thus, consistency in the multimodal input influenced word learning in early childhood but not in adulthood. In terms of a dynamic systems account of word learning, our study shows how multimodal learning settings interact with the child’s perceptual abilities to shape the learning experience.

All Tapped Out: Touchscreen Interactivity and Young Children's Word Learning.

Touchscreen devices differ from passive screen media in promoting physical interaction with events on the screen. Two studies examined how young children’s screen-directed actions related to self-regulation (Study 1) and word learning (Study 2). In Study 1, 30 2-year-old children’s tapping behaviors during game play were related to their self-regulation, measured using Carlson’s snack task: girls and children with high self-regulation tapped significantly less during instruction portions of an app (including object labeling events) than did boys and children with low self-regulation. Older preschoolers (N = 47, aged 4–6 years) tapped significantly less during instruction than 2-year-olds did. Study 2 explored whether the particular way in which 170 children (2–4 years of age) interacted with a touchscreen app affected their learning of novel object labels. Conditions in which children tapped or dragged a named object to move it across the screen required different amounts of effort and focus, compared to a non-interactive (watching) condition. Age by sex interactions revealed a particular benefit of dragging (a motorically challenging behavior) for preschool girls’ learning compared to that of boys, especially for girls older than age 2. Boys benefited more from watching than dragging. Children from low socioeconomic status families learned more object names when dragging objects versus tapping them, possibly because tapping is a prepotent response that does not require thoughtful attention. Parents and industry experts should consider age, sex, self-regulation, and the physical requirements of children’s engagement with touchscreens when designing and using educational content.

Effect of Objects Surrounding a Referent on Young Children’s Interpretation of Word Meanings

This study examined the effect of objects surrounding a referent on young children's interpretation of word meanings. In Study 1, 50 children aged 5 years (28 females, 22 males; mean age: 5 years 8 months, SD: 2.37) took part in a novel label task wherein they were given a novel word for a target object with its surrounding object in two conditions, namely, high ordinariness (e.g., an elephant in a cage) or low ordinariness (e.g., an elephant riding in a car). The participants in both conditions tended to interpret the novel word as a name denoting the target object and its surrounding object. In Study 2, which used the same task, 50 children aged 5 years (26 females, 24 males; mean age: 5 years 8 months, SD: 2.47) were given a novel word for a target object with its surrounding object in two conditions, namely high proximity (e.g., an elephant in a cage) or low proximity (e.g., an elephant near a tree). Participants in the high proximity condition tended to interpret the novel word as referring to a name that incorporated the target item and its surrounding object. In contrast, the participants in low proximity condition tended to interpret the novel word as referring to the name of the target object only (e.g., “elephant”). These results suggest that perceptual factors, such as the proximity of the referent and its surrounding objects, influence word learning in young children. The findings are discussed with respect to young children’s word learning in everyday life.

Cross-situational statistical word learning in young children

Recent empirical work has highlighted the potential role of cross-situational statistical word learning in children’s early vocabulary development. In the current study, we tested 5- to 7-year-old children’s cross-situational learning by presenting children with a series of ambiguous naming events containing multiple words and multiple referents. Children rapidly learned word-to-object mappings by attending to the co-occurrence regularities across these ambiguous naming events. The current study begins to address the mechanisms underlying children’s learning by demonstrating that the diversity of learning contexts affects performance. The implications of the current findings for the role of cross-situational word learning at different points in development are discussed along with the methodological implications of employing school-aged children to test hypotheses regarding the mechanisms supporting early word learning.

Goodnight book: sleep consolidation improves word learning via storybooks.

Reading the same storybooks repeatedly helps preschool children learn words. In addition, sleeping shortly after learning also facilitates memory consolidation and aids learning in older children and adults. The current study explored how sleep promotes word learning in preschool children using a shared storybook reading task. Children were either read the same story repeatedly or different stories and either napped after the stories or remained awake. Children's word retention were tested 2.5 h later, 24 h later, and 7 days later. Results demonstrate strong, persistent effects for both repeated readings and sleep consolidation on young children's word learning. A key finding is that children who read different stories before napping learned words as well as children who had the advantage of hearing the same story. In contrast, children who read different stories and remained awake never caught up to their peers on later word learning tests. Implications for educational practices are discussed.

Evaluation of a principled approach to vocabulary learning in mainstream classes

Research indicates that a significant number of children enter primary school with insufficient vocabulary knowledge. This study investigates whether a small group daily word learning programme delivered by the class teacher can improve word learning in young children. Eighteen children, aged five to six years, with English as an additional language or poor language development, attending three schools in an area of social deprivation, participated in the study. Class teachers implemented a principled approach for teaching and learning vocabulary that included the development of word-learning strategies. Vocabulary knowledge was assessed pre- and post-intervention using a non-standardized, study-specific measure that compared taught and untaught vocabulary. Receptive vocabulary was also measured using standardized assessment. Pupil and teacher questionnaires were presented before and after the intervention. There were significant changes in children’s knowledge of both taught and untaught words, with more change in knowledge of taught words. Some children also showed significant change on standardized measurement of vocabulary. Class teachers reported changes in their practice and some children reported using a wider range of strategies to learn words.

Word learning from videos: more evidence from 2‐year‐olds

AbstractYoung children are frequently exposed to examples of screen media like videos. The current studies asked whether videos would support word learning and whether word learning from videos might resemble word learning from a live speaker. In Study 1, 2‐year‐olds saw a video of a target image being labelled with a novel word and were later asked to point to and name the image and its live counterpart. Study 2 was similar except that 2‐year‐olds were asked to solve video and live versions of the disambiguation task (i.e. to point to and name a distracter image and its live counterpart). Results showed that 2‐year‐olds learned and disambiguated words from video (as measured by both pointing and naming) and that learning was similar on the video and live versions of each task. These results have important implications for theories of word learning and for the viability of video as a source for young children's word learning. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Shared book reading: When and how questions affect young children's word learning.

Shared book reading, and the conversation that accompanies it, can facilitate young children's vocabulary growth. To identify the features of extratextual questions that help 3-year-olds learn unfamiliar words during shared book reading, two experiments explored the impact of cognitive demand level, placement, and an approximation to scaffolding. Asking questions about target words improved children's comprehension and production of word-referent associations, and children with larger vocabularies learned more than children with smaller vocabularies. Neither the demand level nor placement of questions differentially affected word learning. However, an approximation to scaffolding, in which adults asked low demand questions when words first appeared and high demand questions later, did facilitate children's deeper understanding of word meanings as assessed with a definition task. These results are unique in experimentally demonstrating the value for word learning of shifting from less to more challenging input over time. Discussion focuses on why a scaffolding-like procedure improves children's acquisition of elaborated word meanings

Productive Vocabulary Size Predicts Event-related Potential Correlates of Fast Mapping in 20-Month-Olds

Although it is well documented that children undergo a productive vocabulary spurt late in the second year, it is unclear whether this development is accompanied by equally significant advances in receptive word processing. In the present study, we tested an electrophysiological procedure for assessing receptive word learning in young children, and the impact of productive vocabulary size for performance in this task. We found that 20-month-olds with high productive vocabularies displayed an N400 incongruity effect to violations of trained associations between novel words and pictures, whereas 20-month-olds with low productive vocabularies did not. However, both high and low producers showed an N400 effect for common real words paired with an incongruous object. These findings indicate that there may be substantial differences in receptive fast mapping efficiency between typically developing children who have reached a productive vocabulary spurt and typically developing children who have not yet reached this productive spurt.

Learning words from reliable and unreliable speakers

Three studies examined whether 3- and 4-year olds would trust a reliable speaker over an unreliable speaker when learning a new word and whether that trust would be reversed, and the word mapping revised, when a trusted speaker later proved unreliable. Study 1 indicated that 3- and 4-year olds trusted a reliable speaker over an unreliable speaker. Study 2 indicated that some 4-year olds reversed trust and revised a word mapping when a trusted speaker later proved unreliable. Study 3 indicated that those 4-year olds who reversed trust and revised the word mapping were likely to maintain the revision and tended to favor the previously reliable speaker over time. These results are discussed in terms of the role of speaker reliability in young children's word learning.

Lexical competition in young children’s word learning

In two experiments, 1.5-year-olds were taught novel words whose sound patterns were phonologically similar to familiar words (novel neighbors) or were not (novel nonneighbors). Learning was tested using a picture-fixation task. In both experiments, children learned the novel nonneighbors but not the novel neighbors. In addition, exposure to the novel neighbors impaired recognition performance on familiar neighbors. Finally, children did not spontaneously use phonological differences to infer that a novel word referred to a novel object. Thus, lexical competition—inhibitory interaction among words in speech comprehension—can prevent children from using their full phonological sensitivity in judging words as novel. These results suggest that word learning in young children, as in adults, relies not only on the discrimination and identification of phonetic categories, but also on evaluating the likelihood that an utterance conveys a new word.