The Role of Semantic Context and Memory in the Acquisition of Novel Nouns

Abstract

Three studies assessed the ability of 2-year-olds to use semantic context to infer the meanings of novel nouns and to retain those meanings a day later. In the first experiment, 24 2-year-olds heard novel nouns in sentences that contained semantically constraining verbs (e.g., "Mommy feeds the ferret"). They chose from a set of four novel object pictures to indicate the referent. Children learned a majority of the novel words. However, they occasionally failed to choose the correct object even when they understood the verb. Experiment 2 examined whether this was due to an inability to identify some of the pictures of novel objects. Experiment 3 tested 24 2-year-olds' memory for the newly learned nouns following a 24 hr delay and found significant retention. Results are discussed in terms of learning mechanisms that facilitate vocabulary acquisition in young children.

The Type, but Not the Amount, of Information Available Influences Toddlers' Fast Mapping and Retention of New Words

“…Our results are consistent with those of previous studies in terms of affirming toddlers' ability to retain words after fairly minimal exposure (Brady & Goodman, 2007;Carey, 1978;Carey & Bartlett, 1978;Goodman et al, 1998;Markson & Bloom, 1997;Mervis & Bertrand, 1994) and have expanded on those findings by suggesting that toddlers do so across a variety of cues and even when their mappings have not been confirmed.…”

“…For example, in a study by Brown (1957), 3-to 5-yearold children used syntactic cues in the form of the grammatical morphemes -ing, some, and a to map the new word sib to an action (sibbing), a substance (some sib), or an object (a sib; see also Gelman & Taylor, 1984;Katz, Baker, & MacNamara, 1974;Liitschwager & Markman, 1994). Children as young as 20 months of age use this type of semantic information to infer the meanings of novel nouns (Brady & Goodman, 2007;Goodman, McDonough, & Brown, 1998). Children can also access information from semantic cues to infer word meanings.…”

“…There is also evidence that young children retain referents of words they have learned incidentally (Carey, 1978;Carey & Bartlett, 1978;Markson & Bloom, 1997). Goodman et al (1998) assessed toddlers' memory for six words whose meanings they had inferred from semantic context (e.g., "Daddy feeds the ferret. "Let's use the koba," etc.).…”

Too Much of a Good Thing: How Novelty Biases and Vocabulary Influence Known and Novel Referent Selection in 18‐Month‐Old Children and Associative Learning Models

“…Thus, long‐term learning does not occur instantly, but it develops over a longer timescale (Carey & Bartlett, ; McMurray et al., ; Swingley, ). Prior work further shows that retention is influenced by several factors, including age (Bion et al., ), repetition (Axelsson & Horst, ; Goodman, McDonough, & Brown, ), praise (Mervis & Bertrand, ), and number of competitors (Horst, Scott, & Pollard, ). This suggests that although initial exposure to a word is only a small step in learning, the context in which a word is initially encountered may have cascading effects on learning (see Kucker, McMurray, & Samuelson, ; McMurray et al., ).…”

Two-year-olds use distributional cues to interpret transitivity-alternating verbs

“…For example, 2-year-olds better comprehend sentences with animate than inanimate subjects, suggesting some sensitivity to the tendency for subject noun phrases to be animate (Childers & Echols, 2004; Corrigan, 1988; Lempert, 1989). Two-year-olds also use knowledge of the animacy of likely argument role-fillers for a particular verb in sentence comprehension: for example, they inferred that an unfamiliar noun must refer to an animal if it was the object of feed (“Mommy’s feeding the ferret!”; Goodman, McDonough, & Brown, 1998; see also Corrigan & Stevenson, 1994; Fernald, 2007). Children’s ability to track the distributions of particular lexical items relative to one another is also well documented.…”