To test general and specific processes of symbol learning, 4- and 5-year-old children learned three kinds of abstract associates for novel objects: words, facts, and pictograms. To test fast mapping (i.e., one-trial learning) and subsequent learning, comprehension was tested after each of four exposures. Production was also tested, as was…

This study examined whether children use prosodic correlates to word meaning when interpreting novel words. For example, do children infer that a word spoken in a deep, slow, loud voice refers to something larger than a word spoken in a high, fast, quiet voice? Participants were 4- and 5-year-olds who viewed picture pairs that varied along a…

Learning a new word consists of two primary tasks that have often been conflated into a single process: "referent selection", in which a child must determine the correct referent of a novel label, and "referent retention", which is the ability to store this newly formed label-object mapping in memory for later use. In addition,…

Examined a blank comparison method for evaluating emergent symbol mapping and learning of new word: picture matching relations by 3- to 5-year olds. Found that the method had considerable promise for advancing theoretical analyses of emergent mapping in behavior analytic and developmental language research. (KB)

Two experiments explored the tendency of preschoolers to map novel nouns and verbs onto unfamiliar rather than familiar objects or actions. This disambiguation effect has been interpreted as evidence that youngsters expect object or action labels to be mutually exclusive. The effect was stronger for object than for action words. (MDM)