Infancy. 2009 Jan 02;14(1):60-76. doi: 10.1080/15250000802569702. Epub 2009 Jan 01.

Learning Words Over Time: The Role of Stimulus Repetition in Mutual Exclusivity.

Infancy : the official journal of the International Society on Infant Studies

Emily Mather, Kim Plunkett

PMID: 32693468 DOI: 10.1080/15250000802569702

Abstract

During the second year of life, infants develop a preference to attach novel labels to novel objects. This behavior is commonly known as "mutual exclusivity" (Markman, 1989). In an intermodal preferential looking experiment with 19.5- and 22.5-month-olds, stimulus repetition was critical for observing mutual exclusivity. On the first occasion that a novel label was presented with 1 familiar object and 1 novel object, looking behavior was unsystematic. However, on reexposure to the same stimuli, 22.5-month-olds looked preferentially at the novel object prior to the re-presentation of the novel label. These findings suggest a powerful memory mechanism for novel labels and objects, enabling mutual exclusivity to emerge across repeated exposures to potential referents.

2009 International Society on Infant Studies.

References

1. Akhtar, N., Carpenter, M., & Tomasello, M. (1996). The role of discourse novelty in early word learning. Child Development, 67, 635-645. - PubMed
2. Bloom, P. (2000). How children learn the meanings of words. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. - PubMed
3. Carey, S. (1978). The child as word-learner. In M. Halle, J. Bresnan, & G. A. Miller (Eds.), Linguistic theory and psychological reality (pp. 264-293). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. - PubMed
4. Clark, E. V. (1993). The lexicon in acquisition. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. - PubMed
5. Diesendruck, G., & Markson, L. (2001). Children's avoidance of lexical overlap: A pragmatic account. Developmental Psychology, 37, 630-644. - PubMed
6. Evey, J. A., & Merriman, W. E. (1998). The prevalence and the weakness of an early name mapping preference. Journal of Child Language, 25, 121-147. - PubMed
7. Halberda, J. (2003). The development of a word-learning strategy. Cognition, 87, B23-B34. - PubMed
8. Halberda, J. (2006). Is this a dax 1 see before me? Use of the logical argument disjunctive syllogism supports word learning in children and adults. Cognitive Psychology, 53(4), 310-344. - PubMed
9. Hamilton, A., Plunkett, K., & Schafer, G. (2000). Infant vocabulary development assessed with a British communicative development inventory. Journal of Child Language, 27, 689-705. - PubMed
10. Heibeck, T. H., & Markman, E. M. (1987). Word learning in children: An examination of fast mapping. Child Development, 58, 1021-1034. - PubMed
11. Hirsh-Pasek, K., Golinkoff, R. M., & Hollich, G. (2000). An emergentist coalition model for word learning: Mapping words to objects is a product of the interaction of multiple cues. In R. M. Golinkoff, K. Hirsh-Pasek, L. Bloom, L. B. Smith, A. L. Woodward, N. Akhtar, et al. (Eds.), Becoming a word learner: A debate on lexical acquisition (pp. 136-164). New York: Oxford University Press. - PubMed
12. Horst, J. S., & Samuelson, L. K. (2008). Fast mapping but poor retention by 24-month-old infants. Infancy, 13, 128-157. - PubMed
13. Houston-Price, C., Mather, E., & Sakkalou, E. (2007). Discrepancy between parental reports of infants' receptive vocabulary and infants' behaviour in a preferential looking task. Journal of Child Language, 34, 701-724. - PubMed
14. Markman, E. M. (1989). Categorization and naming in children: Problems of induction. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. - PubMed
15. Markman, E. M. (1990). Constraints children place on word meanings. Cognitive Science, 14, 57-77. - PubMed
16. Markman, E. M., Wasow, J. L., & Hansen, M. B. (2003). Use of the mutual exclusivity assumption by young word learners. Cognitive Psychology, 47, 241-275. - PubMed
17. Merriman, W. E., & Marazita, J. M. (1994). The effect of hearing similar-sounding words on young 2-year-olds' disambiguation of novel noun reference. Developmental Psychology, 31, 973-984. - PubMed
18. Merriman, W. E., Marazita, J., & Jarvis, L. (1995). Children's disposition to map new words onto new referents. In M. Tomasello & W. E. Merriman (Eds.), Beyond names for things: Young children's acquisition of verbs (pp. 147-183). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc. - PubMed
19. Mervis, C. B., & Bertrand, J. (1994). Acquisition of the novel name-nameless category (n3c) principle. Child Development, 65, 1646-1662. - PubMed
20. Schafer, G., Plunkett, K., & Harris, P. L. (1999). What's in a name? Lexical knowledge drives infants' visual preferences in the absence of referential input. Developmental Science, 2, 187-194. - PubMed
21. Smith, L., & Yu, C. (2008). Infants rapidly learn word-referent mappings via cross-situational statistics. Cognition, 106, 1558-1568. - PubMed
22. Swingley, D., & Aslin, R. N. (2000). Spoken word recognition and lexical representation in very young children. Cognition, 76, 147-166. - PubMed
23. White, K. S., & Morgan, J. L. (2008). Sub-segmental detail in early lexical representations. Journal of Memory and Language, 59, 114-132. - PubMed

Publication Types

• Journal Article