title: Infants' learning of novel words in a stochastic environment.
abstract: In everyday word learning words are only sometimes heard in the presence of their referent, making the acquisition of novel words a particularly challenging task. The current study investigated whether children (18-month-olds who are novice word learners) can track the statistics of co-occurrence between words and objects to learn novel mappings in a stochastic environment. Infants were briefly trained on novel word-novel object pairs with variable degrees of co-occurrence: Words were either paired reliably with 1 referent or stochastically paired with 2 different referents with varying probabilities. Infants were sensitive to the co-occurrence statistics between words and referents, tracking not just the strongest available contingency but also low-frequency information. The statistical strength of the word-referent mapping may also modulate real-time online lexical processing in infants. Infants are thus able to track stochastic relationships between words and referents in the process of learning novel words.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, New York University, New York, NY 10003, USA. athena.vouloumanos@nyu.edu
authors.forename: Athena
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Vouloumanos
authors.forename: Janet F
authors.initials: JF
authors.lastname: Werker
mesh_terms: D000161:Acoustic Stimulation; D000704:Analysis of Variance; D001245:Association Learning / Q000502:physiology*; D001288:Attention / Q000502:physiology; D001307:Auditory Perception / Q000502:physiology; D002657:Child Development / Q000502:physiology; D004193:Discrimination Learning / Q000502:physiology*; D005133:Eye Movements / Q000502:physiology; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007223:Infant; D018730:Infant Behavior / Q000502:physiology*; D008297:Male; D010775:Photic Stimulation; D011930:Reaction Time / Q000502:physiology; D021641:Recognition, Psychology / Q000502:physiology; D013067:Speech Perception / Q000502:physiology; D013269:Stochastic Processes; D013997:Time Factors; D014796:Visual Perception / Q000502:physiology; D014825:Vocabulary