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1-099 - Factors that promote third-party learning in young children

Thu, March 21, 12:30 to 2:00pm, Hilton Baltimore, Floor: Level 2, Key 2

Session Type: Paper Symposium

Integrative Statement

A source of ongoing controversy in the language development literature concerns children’s ability to learn new words through overheard, or third-party interactions. Although several studies have demonstrated a robust ability to learn new words through third-party interactions in the lab (e.g. Akhtar et al., 2001; Akhtar 2005), others have noted that this does not seem to translate to real world language environments (Shneidman & Goldin-Meadow, 2012; Weisleder & Fernald, 2013). One potential explanation for this is that the elements of an in-lab interaction are different from those in the world, and those elements may be key to successful third-party learning. The focus of this symposium is to identify those elements, and how they may vary across populations. The first talk demonstrates that for two-year-olds, shared attention between the interaction’s participants is crucial for learning novel words as a third-party. The second talk suggests that another interaction feature, object handling by the interlocutors, improves learning the label for that object for monolingual, but not multilingual toddlers. The third talk demonstrates that these interactive cues may be less important for children as they enter their preschool years, and learning from third-party interactions may be broadly more viable at this time. However, some information (e.g. facts) may be better learned in these interactions than others. We conclude with a final talk examining observational data, which shows that both children in the U.S. and Mayan children benefit from directed behavioral cues, such as eye contact.

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