• Medientyp: E-Artikel
  • Titel: Finding meaning in a noisy world: exploring the effects of referential ambiguity and competition on 2·5-year-olds’ cross-situational word learning
  • Beteiligte: BUNCE, JOHN P.; SCOTT, ROSE M.
  • Erschienen: Cambridge University Press (CUP), 2017
  • Erschienen in: Journal of Child Language
  • Sprache: Englisch
  • DOI: 10.1017/s0305000916000180
  • ISSN: 0305-0009; 1469-7602
  • Schlagwörter: General Psychology ; Linguistics and Language ; Developmental and Educational Psychology ; Experimental and Cognitive Psychology ; Language and Linguistics
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  • Beschreibung: <jats:title>Abstract</jats:title><jats:p>While recent studies suggest children can use cross-situational information to learn words, these studies involved minimal referential ambiguity, and the cross-situational evidence overwhelmingly favored a single referent for each word. Here we asked whether 2·5-year-olds could identify a noun's referent when the scene and cross-situational evidence were more ambiguous. Children saw four trials in which a novel word occurred with four novel objects; only one object consistently co-occurred with the word across trials. The frequency of distracter objects varied across conditions. When all distracter referents occurred only once (no-competition), children successfully identified the noun's referent. When a high-probability competitor referent occurred on three trials, children identified the target referent if the competitor was absent on the third trial (short-competition) but not if it was present until the fourth trial (long-competition). This suggests that although 2·5-year-olds’ cross-situational learning scales up to more ambiguous scenes, it is disrupted by high-probability competitor referents.</jats:p>