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Reinvestigating the Role of Observational Contexts in Learning Hard Nouns
No full textDevelopmental scientists have long been fascinated by children’s prodigious word learning capacities and by patterns in the composition of children’s early vocabularies that reveal that certain types of words are learned earlier than others. One notable pattern has been that words that denote more abstract concepts (e.g., “story”) are learned later than words that denote concrete objects (e.g., “ball”). In fact, prior studies have concluded that different kinds of abstract words, including nouns whose referents are not whole, concrete objects (or “hard nouns”; Kako, 2005), are not learnable from observational contexts alone and necessitate linguistic information to be learned. In line with the field’s emerging understanding that the trajectory of learning the meaning of many types of words is a long, protracted one (see Ameel et al., 2008), the current study provides empirical evidence that learners may extract systematic partial knowledge of hard noun meanings from the observational contexts these words occur in despite the absence of linguistic information. This partial knowledge may lay the foundation for full meaning acquisition upon the incorporation of linguistic and social information. The current study also highlights the need to carefully consider the tasks used in word learning, and thus our definition of learning
Reinvestigating the Role of Observational Contexts in Learning Hard Nouns
No full textDevelopmental scientists have long been fascinated by children’s prodigious word learning capacities and by patterns in the composition of children’s early vocabularies that reveal that certain types of words are learned earlier than others. One notable pattern has been that words that denote more abstract concepts (e.g., “story”) are learned later than words that denote concrete objects (e.g., “ball”). In fact, prior studies have concluded that different kinds of abstract words, including nouns whose referents are not whole, concrete objects (or “hard nouns”; Kako, 2005), are not learnable from observational contexts alone and necessitate linguistic information to be learned. In line with the field’s emerging understanding that the trajectory of learning the meaning of many types of words is a long, protracted one (see Ameel et al., 2008), the current study provides empirical evidence that learners may extract systematic partial knowledge of hard noun meanings from the observational contexts these words occur in despite the absence of linguistic information. This partial knowledge may lay the foundation for full meaning acquisition upon the incorporation of linguistic and social information. The current study also highlights the need to carefully consider the tasks used in word learning, and thus our definition of learning
Semantic Context Boosts Word Learning from Low-Informative Events
No full textWhen a toddler hears a new word, its meaning is rarely transparent from the situational context in which the word occurred. Prior work has illustrated the challenge of learning from these low informative naming events (Cartmill et al., 2013; Medina et al., 2011). We investigate whether another feature of the learning environment – the rich semantic structure in which words occur (Tamis-LeMonda et al. 2019; Custode & Tamis-LeMonda 2020) – may help learners overcome low informativity of individual naming events. To test this, we designed a modified version of the Human Simulation Paradigm (HSP) in which adult participants (N = 48) were tasked with learning a target word meaning from six low informative scenes. Importantly, half of the participants learned the target word while also learning words from the same semantic category; the other half learned the same target word from the same low informative scenes while learning words from different semantic categories. Participants were better at learning the target word when the low informative scenes occurred in a consistent semantic context, suggesting that semantic structure alleviates the challenge of learning from low informative naming events. Thus, the rich broader semantic context that has been reported in several recent studies (see Roy et al., 2015; Tamis-LeMonda et al., 2019) may prove key to children’s rapid word learning and to resolving the long-standing paradox of children’s word learning
Semantic Context Boosts Word Learning from Low-Informative Events
No full textWhen a toddler hears a new word, its meaning is rarely transparent from the situational context in which the word occurred. Prior work has illustrated the challenge of learning from these low informative naming events (Cartmill et al., 2013; Medina et al., 2011). We investigate whether another feature of the learning environment – the rich semantic structure in which words occur (Tamis-LeMonda et al. 2019; Custode & Tamis-LeMonda 2020) – may help learners overcome low informativity of individual naming events. To test this, we designed a modified version of the Human Simulation Paradigm (HSP) in which adult participants (N = 48) were tasked with learning a target word meaning from six low informative scenes. Importantly, half of the participants learned the target word while also learning words from the same semantic category; the other half learned the same target word from the same low informative scenes while learning words from different semantic categories. Participants were better at learning the target word when the low informative scenes occurred in a consistent semantic context, suggesting that semantic structure alleviates the challenge of learning from low informative naming events. Thus, the rich broader semantic context that has been reported in several recent studies (see Roy et al., 2015; Tamis-LeMonda et al., 2019) may prove key to children’s rapid word learning and to resolving the long-standing paradox of children’s word learning
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Laying the Foundation: Extracting Partial Meanings of Hard Nouns via Observational Contexts
Full text linkA key aspect of understanding how children learn the meanings of words involves understanding how they mine different sources of information (e.g., observational, linguistic) in the service of learning. According to one dominant view, there exists a class of words (i.e., “hard words”; Gleitman et al., 2005) for which learning their meaning requires access to information beyond the observational contexts in which those words occur. Building upon previous work on this topic that employed the Human Simulation Paradigm, a paradigm commonly used for investigating vocabulary learning, the current study revisits the role of observational contexts for the acquisition of one class of hard words: nouns that denote non-basic level object categories (or “hard nouns”; see Kako, 2005). These data reveal that although observational contexts may not be sufficient to yield learning of precise hard noun meanings, they allow learners to extract systematic partial knowledge, knowledge that may lay a critical foundation for meaning
acquisition
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Partial Verb Learning via Observational Contexts
Full text linkChildren learn nouns more readily than verbs in early development. Research on candidate explanations for this noun advantage has suggested that, while noun meanings can be easily gleaned from their observational contexts, verb meanings require access to their syntactic constructions, which remain inaccessible until later in development (Gentner, 2006; McDonough et al., 2011; Piccin & Waxman, 2007). This study asks whether previous demonstrations of tenuous verb learning from their observational contexts are partly due to the assessment method. In an adapted version of the Human Simulation Paradigm (HSP; Gillette et al., 1999), we assessed verb learning using multiple tasks. When verb learning was assessed via a free-response task, learning was minimal, replicating the challenge of learning precise verb meanings via observational contexts. The findings from both a categorization and semantic similarity task, however, suggest that learners do acquire partial knowledge of both action and mental verbs via their observational contexts
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Revisiting the Role of Observational Contexts for Learning Hard Nouns
Full text linkChildren learn words that name objects (“ball”) and those that name abstract concepts (“story”). One view of learning is that different inputs matter for different words (Snedeker & Gleitman, 2004). That is, many argue that although the observational contexts in which words occur are sufficient for learning object names, they are not for learning abstract “hard words” (Gleitman et al., 2005). This study revisited the contributions of observational contexts to learning one type of hard word: nouns denoting non-basic level object categories (“hard nouns” like “friend”; Kako, 2005). In a new artificial learning paradigm, we reveal that although observational contexts were insufficient for full hard noun learning, they afforded learners partial knowledge that allowed them to succeed in some learning tasks. These data highlight how observational contexts may lay the foundation for learning hard nouns, and underscore how definitions of learning impact our understanding of how the input shapes it
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Beyond Word Meaning Mappings: The Role of Low-Informative Events in Conceptual Alignment
Full text linkWord meanings are rarely transparent from their extralinguistic contexts. How children learn words from an input with "low-informative" (LI) events is of interest because even adults struggle to learn from LI events (Gleitman & Trueswell, 2020; Medina et al., 2011). This study revisited LI events' contribution to learning by probing what can be gleaned from LI events even if they don't yield exact meanings. Adults (N = 120) learned words (e.g., "modi") that had English meanings (e.g., "apple") from LI events. Participants then both guessed the word's exact meaning and rated several candidate meanings. Although LI events failed to yield accurate mappings of meanings, they led to representations (derived via the ratings) that were semantically aligned with those of the true meanings. These results highlight the potential for LI events to get learning off the ground and the implications of viewing word learning as more than a mapping problem
Laying the Foundation: Extracting Partial Meanings of Hard Nouns via Observational Contexts
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