Year: 2007
Type: article
Abstract: This paper investigates the role of general attention-shifting mechanisms in children's early adjective learning.A novel version of an adjective-learning paradigm was used to probe whether attentional mechanisms could account for early adjective learning without recourse to high-level syntactic knowledge.Two-and 3-year-olds participated.One condition removed all syntactic information by presenting words in incorrect syntactic order, but with explicit naming of known properties.According to the attention-shifting account, activation of past learned associations through the mention of known words should focus attention on the right association: novel adjective to novel property.Younger children with less linguistic experience successfully learned novel adjectives in this condition, supporting the attentional account.We discuss the attention-shifting mechanism by analogy to attentional highlighting, which accounts for the phenomenon of highlighting in the adult associative learning literature.
Authors: Hanako Yoshida, Rima Hanania
Institutions: University of Houston, Indiana University
Language: English
Subfield: Developmental and Educational Psychology
Field: Psychology
Domain: Social Sciences
SDG: Quality education
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2586790909