title: Information sources for noun learning.
abstract: Why are some words easier to learn than others? And what enables the eventual learning of the more difficult words? These questions were addressed for nouns using a paradigm in which adults were exposed to naturalistic maternal input that was manipulated to simulate access to several different information sources, both alone and in combination: observation of the extralinguistic contexts in which the target word was used, the words that co-occurred with the target word, and the target word's syntactic context. Words that were not accurately identified from observation alone were both abstract (e.g., music) and concrete (e.g., tail). Whether a noun could be learned from observation depended on whether it labeled a basic-level object category (BLOC). However, the difference between BLOC labels and non-BLOC labels was eliminated when observation was supplemented with linguistic context. Thus, although BLOC labels can be learned from observation alone, non-BLOC labels require richer linguistic context. These findings support a model of vocabulary growth in which an important role is played by changes in the information to which learners have access.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, Swarthmore College.
authors.forename: Edward
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Kako