Work

Beyond naïve cue combination: salience and social cues in early word learning

Year: 2015

Type: article

Abstract: Children learn their earliest words through social interaction, but it is unknown how much they rely on social information. Some theories argue that word learning is fundamentally social from its outset, with even the youngest infants understanding intentions and using them to infer a social partner's target of reference. In contrast, other theories argue that early word learning is largely a perceptual process in which young children map words onto salient objects. One way of unifying these accounts is to model word learning as weighted cue combination, in which children attend to many potential cues to reference, but only gradually learn the correct weight to assign each cue. We tested four predictions of this kind of naïve cue combination account, using an eye-tracking paradigm that combines social word teaching and two-alternative forced-choice testing. None of the predictions were supported. We thus propose an alternative unifying account: children are sensitive to social information early, but their ability to gather and deploy this information is constrained by domain-general cognitive processes. Developmental changes in children's use of social cues emerge not from learning the predictive power of social cues, but from the gradual development of attention, memory, and speed of information processing.

Source: Developmental Science

DOI: 10.1111/desc.12349

Authors: Daniel Yurovsky, Michael C. Frank

Institution: Stanford University

Language: English

Topic: Child and Animal Learning Development

Subfield: Developmental and Educational Psychology

Field: Psychology

Domain: Social Sciences

SDG: Quality education

Open Access status: green

Funders: National Institutes of Health, Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development