Cross-Situational Word Learning in Children and Adults: The Case of Lexical Overlap

ABSTRACTCross-situational word learning, the ability to decipher word-referent links over multiple ambiguous learning events, has been documented across development and proposed to be key to vocabulary acquisition. However, this work has largely focused on learning from one-to-one structure, where each referent is consistently linked with a single label. In contrast, learners can encounter lexical overlap, such as when learning synonyms, which requires learning from structure that presents multiple labels linked with the same thing (many-to-one structure). Are children capable of cross-situational word learning from encounters presenting consistent lexical overlap? How does this ability change with age? Here, we provide a first test of cross-situational word learning from input presenting lexical overlap across age by testing 4- to 7-year-old children (N = 190) and adults (N = 80) on their ability to learn from one-to-one or two-to-one structure. Results showed that adults (Experiment 1) were successful at learning from both types of structure, with an advantage for one-to-one structure. Children (Experiment 2) performed less well than adults overall, and failed to learn from two-to-one structure. With extended training (Experiment 3), older children were successful at learning from two-to-one structure while younger children were not. These results provide the first evidence that cross-situational word learning from one-to-one and two-to-one structure improves over age. AcknowledgmentsWe would like to thank Cassandra Leedom, Gillian Bryant, Emily Fatula, Claire Mulholand, Kaitlin Mulvaney, and Susan Webber for their assistance in recruiting and testing our child participants, and Elaina Corbin for assistance in recruiting and testing our adult participants. A portion of the data was presented as part of a senior honors thesis by Elaina Corbin to the Department of Psychology at Arizona State University. We would like to especially thank the staff at the Children’s Museum of Phoenix for their support during data collection, and all college students, children, and parents who participated in our study.Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.Notes1 The adult sample was pre-registered and collected after our child sample. However, we present the adult data first as this facilitates the interpretation of the child data.2 Our final sample size for each condition exceeded that of our target sample size in our pre-registration (N = 30 for each condition). After completing data collection for our pre-registered sample and analyzing the results, we began a replication study based on the effect size of learning in the Two-to-one condition in our pre-registered sample. This effort was interrupted in March 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Given our inability to continue our replication sample, we opted to combine our two samples in this report. Results with the combined sample were qualitatively similar to the smaller pre-registered sample. The results for the smaller pre-registered sample are reported in supplementary material on OSF: https://osf.io/w9hf53 When age was entered as a continuous variable in the model, results revealed a significant effect of age on children’s accuracy, matching the linear regression results. We believe we may be losing some power by including age as a categorical variable in the reported model.