Two-year-olds’ eye movements reflect confidence in their understanding of words

Dautriche, Isabelle; Goupil, Louise; Smith, Kenny; Rabagliati, Hugh

doi:10.31234/osf.io/pd6xh

Cited by 3 publications

(2 citation statements)

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“…For instance, children fail to verbally identify novel objects or novel words as ones they don't know until they are about four years old (Marazita & Merriman, 2004;Slocum & Merriman, 2018). However, a recent study provides evidence that even 2-year-old children can evaluate the confidence associated with word recognition (Dautriche, Goupil, Smith, & Rabagliati, 2021), suggesting that even toddlers may be able to use basic forms of metacognition (i.e., "core" metacognition: Goupil & Kouider, 2019;Proust, 2012;Shea et al, 2014), such as the ability to estimate decision confidence, to aid in the process of learning a lexicon. Such confidence estimates could be used by children to optimise how they allocate attention during learning (e.g., ignoring situations in which high-confidence words are used), or to guide interrogative behaviors (e.g., asking clarification when confidence is low), i.e., employing active learning strategies.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Subjective confidence influences word learning in a cross-situational statistical learning task

Dautriche¹,

Rabagliati²,

Smith³

2021

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Learning is often accompanied by a subjective sense of confidence in one's knowledge, a feeling of knowing what you know and how well you know it. Subjective confidence has been shown to guide learning in other domains, but has received little attention so far in the word learning literature. Across three word learning experiments, we investigated whether and how a sense of confidence in having acquired a word meaning influences the word learning process itself. First, we show evidence for a confirmation bias during word learning in a cross-situational statistical learning task: Learners who are highly confident they know the meaning of a word are more likely to persist in their belief than learners who are not, even after observing objective evidence disconfirming their belief. Second, we show that subjective confidence in a word-meaning modulates inferential processes based on that word, affecting learning over the whole lexicon: Learners who hold high confidence in a word-meaning are more likely to use that word to make mutual exclusivity inferences about the meaning of other words. We conclude that confidence influences word learning by modulating both information selection processes and inferential processes and discuss the implications of these results for word learning models.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Subjective confidence influences word learning in a cross-situational statistical learning task

Dautriche¹,

Rabagliati²,

Smith³

2021

Preprint

Self Cite

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show abstract

“…For example, there is evidence that infants are able to evaluate the reliability of their knowledge or decisions, years before they can provide verbal reports of their knowledge states (e.g., Balcomb & Gerken, 2008;. More recently, Dautriche et al, (2021) also found that even 2-year-olds can evaluate the reliability of their lexical knowledge. In a modified version of the looking-whilelistening task (Golinkoff et al, 1987), infants looked longer towards the image they chose as the target when they had reasons to be sure about that word's meaning.…”

Section: Challenges To the Predictive Processing Approach In Language...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Learning to predict and predicting to learn: Before and beyond the syntactic bootstrapper

Babineau

Havron

Dautriche

et al. 2022

Language Acquisition

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Young children can exploit the syntactic context of a novel word to narrow down its probable meaning. This is syntactic bootstrapping. A learner that uses syntactic bootstrapping to foster lexical acquisition must first have identified the semantic information that a syntactic context provides. Based on the semantic seed hypothesis, children discover the semantic predictiveness of syntactic contexts by tracking the distribution of familiar words. We propose that these learning mechanisms relate to a larger cognitive model: the predictive processing framework. According to this model, we perceive and make sense of the world by constantly predicting what will happen next in a probabilistic fashion. We outline evidence that prediction operates within language acquisition, and show how this framework helps us understand the way lexical knowledge refines syntactic predictions and how syntactic knowledge refines predictions about novel words' meanings. The predictive processing framework entails that learners can adapt to recent information and update their linguistic model. Here we review some of the recent experimental work showing that the type of prediction preschool children make from a syntactic context can change when they are presented with convincing contrary evidence from recent input. We end by discussing some challenges of applying the predictive processing framework to syntactic bootstrapping and propose new avenues to investigate in future work.

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Learning to predict and predicting to learn: Before and beyond the syntactic bootstrapper

Babineau¹,

Havron²,

Carvalho³

et al. 2022

Preprint

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Young children can exploit the syntactic context of a novel word to narrow down itsprobable meaning. This is syntactic bootstrapping. A learner that uses syntacticbootstrapping to foster lexical acquisition must first have identified the semanticinformation that a syntactic context provides. Based on the semantic seed hypothesis,children discover the semantic predictiveness of syntactic contexts by tracking thedistribution of familiar words. We propose that these learning mechanisms relate to a largercognitive model: the predictive processing framework. According to this model, weperceive and make sense of the world by constantly predicting what will happen next in aprobabilistic fashion. We outline evidence that prediction operates within languageacquisition, and show how this framework helps us understand the way lexical knowledgerefines syntactic predictions and how syntactic knowledge refines predictions about novelwords’ meanings. The predictive processing framework entails that learners can adapt torecent information and update their linguistic model. Here we review some of the recentexperimental work showing that the type of prediction preschool children make from asyntactic context can change when they are presented with convincing contrary evidencefrom recent input. We end by discussing some challenges of applying the predictiveprocessing framework to syntactic bootstrapping and propose new avenues to investigatein future work.

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Two-year-olds’ eye movements reflect confidence in their understanding of words

Cited by 3 publications

References 44 publications

Subjective confidence influences word learning in a cross-situational statistical learning task

Subjective confidence influences word learning in a cross-situational statistical learning task

Learning to predict and predicting to learn: Before and beyond the syntactic bootstrapper

Learning to predict and predicting to learn: Before and beyond the syntactic bootstrapper

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