Can We Dissociate Contingency Learning from Social Learning in Word Acquisition by 24-month-olds?

Overview

Journal PLoS One

Specialties General Medicine
Science

Date 2012 Nov 28

PMID 23185473

Citations 1

Authors

Colin Bannard

Michael Tomasello

Affiliations

Soon will be listed here.

Abstract

We compared 24-month-old children's learning when their exposure to words came either in an interactive (coupled) context or in a nonsocial (decoupled) context. We measured the children's learning with two different methods: one in which they were asked to point to the referent for the experimenter, and the other a preferential looking task in which they were encouraged to look to the referent. In the pointing test, children chose the correct referents for words encountered in the coupled condition but not in the decoupled condition. In the looking time test, however, they looked to the targets regardless of condition. We explore the explanations for this and propose that the different response measures are reflecting two different kinds of learning.

Citing Articles

Learning in Complex Environments: The Effects of Background Speech on Early Word Learning.

McMillan B, Saffran J Child Dev. 2016; 87(6):1841-1855.

PMID: 27441911 PMC: 5113671. DOI: 10.1111/cdev.12559.

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