Poster #108 - As Good as Telling You: High Alignment Promotes Incidental Word Learning

• In Event: 3-206 - Poster Session 13
  In Poster Session: PS 13 Section - Language, Communication

Integrative Statement

Young children can learn new words via incidental learning, without direct pedagogical interaction (e.g. Carey & Bartlett, 1978; Akhtar, 2005). Our research investigates the role of perceptual alignability in such learning. In previous studies, we presented 3-and 4-year-olds with two objects and asked them to “point to the chromium one, not the blue one” (as in Carey & Bartlett, 1978), while varying the perceptual similarity (and alignability) of the objects (Shao & Gentner, 2016) (Figure 1). Although nearly all children pointed correctly, only those who saw highly alignable pairs (HA) learned the novel color word chromium, as assessed by a later yes-no classification test. Those who saw low alignable pairs (LA) performed at chance.

We suggest that the highly alignable pairs induced spontaneous comparison—the color difference naturally “popped out” as an alignable difference (Markman & Gentner, 1993), making it a salient referent for the novel adjective. We further suggest that this process was implicit—children were simply complying with the pointing task, not trying to learn a word meaning. However, it is possible that children interpreted the pointing task as a word-learning task. This would disadvantage the LA group (whose figures differ in both shape and color) relative to the HA group (whose figures have only one difference—color).

Here we test whether children were engaged in implicit learning in prior studies by comparing performance in the previous study (E1) with performance in a similar direct-instruction condition (E2). Before the task, we presented 4-year-olds (n= 36) with explicit instructions to learn the meaning of the word chromium. They were told “In this game, you have a special mission—you have to learn a new word, chromium. Can you say chromium?” The procedure was otherwise identical to that of E1.

If children were engaged in deliberate word-learning in E1, then we should see the same pattern of results in E2. If, however, children in E1 were not engaged in explicit learning, and the advantage of HA over LA in E1 resulted from their greater likelihood of spontaneous comparison, then introducing a direct word-learning instruction should alter the results. Specifically, performance should increase for the LA group.

The results showed very different patterns for the two studies. In contrast to E1, LA children in E2 performed above chance; in fact, they performed as well as HA children. Comparing children’s performance between the two studies, we found no difference between the two HA groups (Figure 2). In contrast, the LA groups showed a trend toward higher performance in E2 (ME2 = 2.39) than in E1 (ME1 = 1.77), p = .054.

The marked improvement in the LA group in E2 suggests that children in E1 did not interpret the task as a word-learning task. Rather, they were simply complying with the experimenter’s request to point to a certain object; the HA advantage resulted from spontaneous perceptual alignment. When children can easily align what they see, their spontaneous incidental learning can be as effective as learning with explicit instructions.

Authors

• Ruxue Shao, Northwestern University
  Presenting Author

• Dedre Gentner, Northwestern University
  Non-Presenting Author