Explicit encoding vs. fast mapping of novel spoken words: Electrophysiological and behavioural evidence of diverging mechanisms

Electrophysiology of Word Learning

“…Such an amplitude increase was not found either for the familiar words or for acoustically similar untrained control stimuli. Similar findings were obtained for implicit learning of novel words that appeared in ten different questions asked about graphical images featuring novel objects [68,69]; remarkably, in these studies the effects were found not only in the N400 time range, but also much earlier, at 170-200 ms in passive auditory ERP recordings, indicating enhanced lexical (or lexicosemantic) access of novel words after a short exposure in meaningful audio-visual contexts. In line with this, very early (from 150 ms) modulations of ERP responses to new words learned implicitly from short visually presented stories (in which only five instances of a novel word were incorporated) were also shown [70] to reflect the semantics of these novel words: concrete vs. abstract.…”

“…Some studies have used audio-visual associative learning designs to directly compare explicit and implicit learning. Shtyrov and colleagues [68,69] reported that ERP patterns elicited in a passive listening paradigm by novel words immediately after the training session differed as early as at ~170 ms, and indicated a more diffuse activity for explicitly learnt words (suggestive of the executive system's involvement), as opposed to the core language areas (particularly in the temporal lobe) contributing to the implicit word acquisition from context. Moreover, behaviorally measured performance on novel words in a semantic task showed a correlation with the amplitude of an earlier ERP peak around 190 ms (putatively linked to automatic processing stages) for implicit learning, and only with a later peak (~280 ms) for the explicit acquisition, the latter being in line with the time interval of attention-related P3/P300 response [69].…”

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“…Two experiments were carried out using a novel protocol for learning novel word forms (labels) with picture associations in FM and EE conditions (for details, see Shtyrov et al, 2021Shtyrov et al, , 2022Perikova et al, 2022). Participants were asked to answer (using button presses) auditorily presented questions about the characteristics of the objects they were unfamiliar with, such as obsolete musical instruments or rare insects.…”

Problems and research prospects on learning of new words: Fast mapping vs explicit encoding

“…Кроме того, различия были обнаружены и во временны`х параметрах активности нейронной динамики между двумя стратегиями при усвоении новых слов (Shtyrov et al, 2022). Взаимосвязь успешности выполнения проверочных заданий с более ранними пиками (в промежутке 176-216 мс) была характерна для быстрого картирования, с более поздними (260-300 мс) -для явного кодирования.…”