title: Cross-situational statistical word learning in young children.
abstract: Recent empirical work has highlighted the potential role of cross-situational statistical word learning in children's early vocabulary development. In the current study, we tested 5- to 7-year-old children's cross-situational learning by presenting children with a series of ambiguous naming events containing multiple words and multiple referents. Children rapidly learned word-to-object mappings by attending to the co-occurrence regularities across these ambiguous naming events. The current study begins to address the mechanisms underlying children's learning by demonstrating that the diversity of learning contexts affects performance. The implications of the current findings for the role of cross-situational word learning at different points in development are discussed along with the methodological implications of employing school-aged children to test hypotheses regarding the mechanisms supporting early word learning.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN 47405, USA; Department of Psychology, Emory University, Atlanta, GA 30322, USA. Electronic address: ssuanda@indiana.edu.
authors.forename: Sumarga H
authors.initials: SH
authors.lastname: Suanda
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, Emory University, Atlanta, GA 30322, USA.
authors.forename: Nassali
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Mugwanya
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, Emory University, Atlanta, GA 30322, USA.
authors.forename: Laura L
authors.initials: LL
authors.lastname: Namy
mesh_terms: D002648:Child; D002675:Child, Preschool; D005260:Female; D005793:Generalization, Psychological; D006801:Humans; D007804:Language Development; D008297:Male; D014706:Verbal Learning; D014825:Vocabulary
keywords: Contextual diversity; Cross-situational learning; Language development; Statistical learning; Vocabulary acquisition; Word learning