Improvements of Statistical Learning Skills Allow Older Children to Go Beyond Single-Hypothesis Testing When Learning Words

Abstract

Children learn words in ambiguous situations, where multiple objects can potentially be referents for a new word. Yet, researchers debate whether children maintain a single word-object hypothesis – and revise it if falsified by later information – or whether children establish a network of word-object associations whose relative strengths are modulated with experience. To address this issue, we presented 4- to 12-year-old children with sets of mutual exclusivity (fast-mapping) trials: offering them with obvious initial hypotheses (that the novel object is the referent for the novel word). We observe that children aged six years and above, despite showing a novelty bias and retaining this novel word – novel object association, also formed an association between the novel word and the name-known object, thereby suggesting that older children attend to more than one word-object association, in a manner similar to associative learning. We discuss our findings in the context of competing theoretical accounts related to word learning.

Four‐ and six‐year‐old children track a single meaning with both familiar and unfamiliar referents when the referent is clear: More evidence for propose‐but‐verify

“…These differences may be attributable to adults’ better memory since children and adults differ in their memory capacity, since children's memory capacity develops with age (Bauer & Larkina, 2016; Ngo et al., 2019), with episodic memory showing accelerated growth in middle childhood (Canada et al., 2020; Riggins, 2014). These findings are consistent with work testing children older than 6, for example, Sia and Mayor (2022) tested children ages 4 through 12, and found that children younger than 6.5 did single‐referent tracking, and older children were tracking multiple objects. Though the specific age when children started to be able to track multiple objects aside is unclear3, it's important to note that solving the problem of referential ambiguity based on observational learning is relevant only for the first few years of life (Gleitman & Trueswell, 2020).…”

“…These findings are consistent with work testing children older than 6, for example, Sia and Mayor (2022) tested children ages 4 through 12, and found that children younger than 6.5 did single-referent tracking, and older children were tracking multiple objects. Though the specific age when children started to be able to track multiple objects aside is unclear 3 , it's important to note that solving the problem of referential ambiguity based on observational learning is relevant only for the first few years of life (Gleitman & Trueswell, 2020).…”

“…In all conditions, children's data suggested that they remember their very first guess for a word through different trials, and only the first guess is remembered. Using a different design, Sia and Mayor (2022) tested children between 4 and 12 years of age. They found that all children were able to perform above chance in trials containing the current referent, but only older children began to represent objects that co-occurred but were not selected from learning.…”

“…It's also notable thatSia and Mayor (2022) only included 12 6-year-olds in their study, thus their claim that 6.5-years, rather than older children may not have great empirical support.…”