Multiple Examples Support Children’s Word Learning: The Roles of Aggregation, Decontextualization, and Memory Dynamics

Sandhofer, Catherine M.; Schonberg, Christina

doi:10.1007/978-3-030-35594-4_8

Cited by 4 publications

(12 citation statements)

References 79 publications

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“…Second, in other studies with pre‐school‐age children, even incidental and irrelevant changes, such as the background color of an image in a word‐learning task, result in large effects on both memory and generalization of the words (Vlach & Sandhofer, 2011). Third, what comprises the “same context” broadens over development, such that infants and young children may be more sensitive to context changes than adults (Rovee‐Collier & Cuevas, 2009; also see Sandhofer & Schonberg, 2020). Context changes that are salient to adults may also be unlikely to be unnoticed by children.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Analytic Causal Knowledge for Constructing Useable Empirical Causal Knowledge: Two Experiments on Pre‐schoolers

Cheng¹,

Sandhofer²,

Liljeholm³

2022

Cognitive Science

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The present paper examines a type of abstract domain-general knowledge required for the process of constructing useable domain-specific causal knowledge, the evident goal of causal learning. It tests the hypothesis that analytic knowledge of causal-invariance decomposition functions is essential for this process. Such knowledge specifies the decomposition of an observed outcome into contributions from constituent causes under the default assumption that the empirical knowledge acquired is invariant across contextual/background causes. The paper reports two psychological experiments (and replication studies) with pre-school-age children on generalization across contexts involving binary cause and effect variables. The critical role of causal invariance for constructing useable causal knowledge predicts that even young children should (tacitly) use the causal-invariance decomposition function for such variables rather than a non-causal-invariance decomposition function common in statistical practice in research involving binary outcomes. The findings support the rational shaping of empirical causal knowledge by the causal-invariance constraint, ruling out alternative explanations in terms of non-causal-invariance decomposition functions, heuristics, and biases. For the same causal structure involving candidate causes and outcomes that are binary variables with a "present" value and an "absent" value, the paper argues against the possibility of multiple rational characterizations of the "sameness of causal influence" that justifies generalization across contexts.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Analytic Causal Knowledge for Constructing Useable Empirical Causal Knowledge: Two Experiments on Pre‐schoolers

Cheng¹,

Sandhofer²,

Liljeholm³

2022

Cognitive Science

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“…Fourth, what drives the semantic differentiation should be explored. Decontextualization (Lucariello, Kyratzis, & Engel, 1986;Sandhofer & Schonberg, 2020) would play a central role. Seeing shoes in various contexts (e.g., doorway or shop), or getting to know shoes used in unconventional ways (e.g., shoes as vases) might facilitate semantic differentiation.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Children around 7-or 8month-olds can segment words from continuous speech (Estes & Lew-Williams, 2015;Jusczyk & Aslin, 1995;Jusczyk, Houston, & Newsome, 1999) and such word segmentation becomes more robust to changes in speakers or speakers' emotions around the age of 10 months (Houston & Jusczyk, 2000;Schmale & Seidl, 2009;Singh, Morgan, & White, 2004). Research on word segmentation was a precursor to studies on infant statistical learning in language development (a landmark study is Saffran, Aslin, & Newport, 1996; see also Black & Bergmann, 2017;Saffran & Kirkham, 2018;Sandhofer & Schonberg, 2020).…”

Section: The Dominance Of Nouns In Early Vocabularymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Relatedly, toddlers can form object categories based not only on similarities in shape or function but also on contextual spatiotemporal relations such as "kitchen-related objects" (Mandler, Fivush, & Reznick, 1987; see also Roy et al, 2015). Sandhofer and Schonberg (2020) suggest that contextual cues that co-occur with target objects could be beneficial for aggregating discrete examples together in memory 15 and for forming label-object associations and object categories, especially early in the learning process.…”

Section: Distinctive Characteristics Of Children's Early Wordsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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The differentiation of early word meanings from global to specific categories: Towards a verification of the “semantic pluripotency hypothesis”

Hagihara

2022

Language Acquisition

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“…Thus, when thinking about word learning in children's daily lives, the context refers to all parts of the situation in which the learning event took place. Prior research indicates that children are more likely to aggregate information into one category when there is a greater similarity in their memories of the category instances, even when that information is not diagnostic of the learned category (Sandhofer & Schonberg, 2020). In this way, aspects of the broader context (e.g., location, person speaking) can influence word learning.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Toddler word learning is robust to changes in emotional context

Ogren

Sandhofer

2021

Infant and Child Development

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Word learning is a crucial aspect of early social and cognitive development, and previous research indicates that children's word learning is influenced by the context in which the word is spoken. However, the role of emotions as contextual cues to word learning remains less clear. This study investigated word learning among 2.5-year-old children in angry, happy, sad, and variable emotional contexts. Fifty-six children (30 female; mean age = 2.49 years) participated in a novel noun generalization task in which children observed an experimenter labelling objects in either a consistently angry, consistently happy, consistently sad, or variable (one exemplar per emotion) context. The children were then asked to identify the label-object association. The results revealed that children's performance was above chance levels for all four conditions (all t's > 3.68, all p's < .01), but performance did not significantly differ by condition (F [3,52] = 0.51, p = .677). These results provide valuable information regarding potential boundaries for when contextual information may versus may not influence children's word learning.

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Multiple Examples Support Children’s Word Learning: The Roles of Aggregation, Decontextualization, and Memory Dynamics

Cited by 4 publications

References 79 publications

Analytic Causal Knowledge for Constructing Useable Empirical Causal Knowledge: Two Experiments on Pre‐schoolers

Analytic Causal Knowledge for Constructing Useable Empirical Causal Knowledge: Two Experiments on Pre‐schoolers

The differentiation of early word meanings from global to specific categories: Towards a verification of the “semantic pluripotency hypothesis”

Toddler word learning is robust to changes in emotional context

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