Abstract
Young children can sometimes acquire new vocabulary words with only limited, indirect exposure (Carey & Bartlett, 1978). We propose that structural alignment processes lead to fluent detection of commonalities and differences that facilitate incidental word learning. To test this, we adapted the Carey and Bartlett paradigm, varying the alignability of the objects that 4-year-olds saw while hearing the novel word chromium. In Experiment 1, children in the High-Alignment condition were significantly better than those in the Low-Alignment condition at identifying chromium objects in a subsequent task. In Experiment 2, we ruled out an alternative account by equalizing the overall amount of information presented to the two groups. We also found that the advantage of high alignment persisted after two-to-four days. These results suggest that structural alignment is a mechanism by which children can learn word meanings even in incidental word learning situations.
Original language | English (US) |
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Title of host publication | Proceedings of the 38th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, CogSci 2016 |
Subtitle of host publication | Recognizing and Representing Events |
Editors | Anna Papafragou, Daniel Grodner, Daniel Mirman, John C. Trueswell |
Publisher | The Cognitive Science Society |
Pages | 1038-1043 |
Number of pages | 6 |
ISBN (Electronic) | 9780991196739 |
ISBN (Print) | 978-1510832985 |
State | Published - 2016 |
Event | 38th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society: Recognizing and Representing Events, CogSci 2016 - Philadelphia, United States Duration: Aug 10 2016 → Aug 13 2016 |
Publication series
Name | Proceedings of the 38th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, CogSci 2016 |
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Conference
Conference | 38th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society: Recognizing and Representing Events, CogSci 2016 |
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Country/Territory | United States |
City | Philadelphia |
Period | 8/10/16 → 8/13/16 |
Funding
We thank the children, families, and preschools that participated in the study, Emma Bulzoni and Katherine Cha for their help in conducting the experiments, and members of the Project on Children’s Thinking for their insightful suggestions. This work was supported by NSF SLC Grant SBE-0541957 awarded to the Spatial Intelligence and Learning Center (SILC), and by ONR Grant N00014-13-1-0470 to Dedre Gentner.
Keywords
- alignable differences
- incidental word learning
- structural alignment
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Artificial Intelligence
- Computer Science Applications
- Human-Computer Interaction
- Cognitive Neuroscience