The role of systematicity in early referent selection

Abstract

Previous studies showed that word learning is affected by children's existing knowledge. For instance, knowledge of semantic category aids word learning, whereas a dense phonological neighbourhood impedes learning of similar‐sounding words. Here, we examined to what extent children associate similar‐sounding words (e.g., rat and cat) with objects of the same semantic category (e.g., both are animals), that is, to what extent children assume meaning overlap given form overlap between two words. We tested this by first presenting children (N = 93, Mage = 22.4 months) with novel word‐object associations. Then, we examined the extent to which children assume that a similar sounding novel label, that is, a phonological neighbour, refers to a similar looking object, that is, a likely semantic neighbour, as opposed to a dissimilar looking object. Were children to preferentially fixate the similar‐looking novel object, it would suggest that systematic word form‐meaning relations aid referent selection in young children. While we did not find any evidence for such word form‐meaning systematicity, we demonstrated that children showed robust learning for the trained novel word‐object associations, and were able to discriminate between similar‐sounding labels and also similar‐looking objects. Thus, we argue that unlike iconicity which appears early in vocabulary development, we find no evidence for systematicity in early referent selection.

The development of early phonological networks: An analysis of individual longitudinal vocabulary growth

“…Later on, with access to other kinds of information about words, children may enlist these other potentially more reliable cues to the service of learning. Indeed, the phonological form of a word does not provide children with any information about the meaning of a word or potential referents of the word in the visual world, due to the arbitrariness of early word-form mappings (Sia et al, 2024). With age, children may, therefore, deprioritise leveraging phonological similarity in word learning.…”