Improvements of Statistical Learning Skills Allow Older Children to Go Beyond Single-Hypothesis Testing When Learning Words

Abstract

Children learn words in ambiguous situations, where multiple objects can potentially be referents for a new word. Yet, researchers debate whether children maintain a single word-object hypothesis-and revise it if falsified by later information-or whether children establish a network of word-object associations whose relative strengths are modulated with experience. To address this issue, we presented 4-to 12-year-old children with sets of mutual exclusivity (fast-mapping) trials: offering them with obvious initial hypotheses (that the novel object is the referent for the novel word). We observe that children aged six years and above, despite showing a novelty bias and retaining this novel word-novel object association, also formed an association between the novel word and the name-known object, thereby suggesting that older children attend to more than one word-object association, in a manner similar to associative learning. We discuss our findings in the context of competing theoretical accounts related to word learning.