Symbolic flexibility during unsupervised word learning in children and adults.

ABSTRACT: Considerable debate in language acquisition concerns whether word learning is driven by domain-general (symbolically flexible) or domain-specific learning mechanisms. Prior work has shown that very young children can map objects to either words or nonlinguistic sounds, but by 20 months of age this ability narrows to only words. This suggests that although symbolically flexible mechanisms are operative early, they become more specified over development. However, such research has been conducted only with young children in ostensive teaching contexts. Thus, we investigated symbolic flexibility at later ages in more referentially ambiguous learning situations. In Experiment 1, 47 6- to 8-year-olds acquired eight symbol-object mappings in a cross-situational word learning paradigm where multip

SUBMITTER: Roembke TC 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6086380 | biostudies-literature | 2018 Nov

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature