The Effect of Word Learning from Context on Mapping onto Visual Referents
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Date
2025-05
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The Ohio State University
Abstract
One of the biggest challenges children must overcome in the process of word learning is the Mapping Problem, i.e., understanding which words relate to which objects in the environment (Lewis & Frank, 2013). This study examined whether linguistic context helps children solve this problem. We exposed 4- to 5-year-old children (n = 56) to short stories with embedded pseudowords. After listening, participants completed an intuition test to their initial understanding of the pseudowords, followed by a label extension task under one of two conditions: congruent or incongruent. In the congruent condition, feedback to the participants coincided with the implied pseudoword meanings, while the incongruent condition feedback was contradictory to the pseudoword meanings. We predicted that by comparing the learning outcomes between the two conditions, we would be able to assess how linguistic context affects children’s ability to map novel words onto specific objects. More specifically, we hypothesized that participants in the congruent condition would demonstrate higher response accuracy in the final phase of the label extension task, suggesting that children can successfully implement meaning gleaned from linguistic context during later mapping onto visual referents. However, the results of the current study were inconclusive in supporting this hypothesis, as we were not able to demonstrate that children successfully learned the pseudowords during the story context phase.
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Keywords
word learning, associative learning, language acquisition, mapping problem, semantic generalization, linguistic context