Department of Psychology, Lancaster University, Lancaster LA1 4YF, United Kingdom.
Department of Psychology, Lancaster University, Lancaster LA1 4YF, United Kingdom; Department of English, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, P.O Box 1641, Netherlands.
Cognition. 2020 Jul;200:104265. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2020.104265. Epub 2020 Apr 4.
Word learning is complicated by referential ambiguity - there are often multiple potential targets for a newly-heard word. While typically developing (TD) children can accurately infer word meanings from cross-situational statistics, specific difficulties tracking word-object co-occurrences may contribute to language impairments in autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Here, we investigate cross-situational word learning as an integrated system including mapping, retention, and generalisation in both typical development and autism. In Study 1, children with ASD were as accurate at disambiguating the meanings of novel words from statistical correspondences as TD controls matched on receptive vocabulary. In Study 2, both populations spontaneously utilised social and non-social attentional cues to facilitate and accelerate their mapping of word-referent relationships. Across Studies 1 and 2, both groups retrieved and generalised word-referent representations with impressive and comparable accuracy. Although children with ASD performed very similarly to TD children on measures of learning accuracy, they were significantly slower to identify correct referents under both cued and non-cued learning conditions. These findings indicate that mechanisms supporting cross-situational word learning, and the relationships between them, are not qualitatively atypical in language-delayed children with ASD. However, the increased time required to generate correct responses suggests that these mechanisms may be less efficient, potentially impacting learning in natural environments where visual and auditory stimuli are presented rapidly. Our data support claims that word learning in the longer term is driven by the gradual accumulation of word-object associations over multiple learning instances and could potentially inform the development of interventions designed to scaffold word learning.
词汇学习受到指称歧义的影响——对于一个新听到的词，通常有多个潜在的目标。虽然典型发展（TD）的儿童可以从跨情境统计数据中准确推断单词的含义，但跟踪单词-对象共现的特定困难可能会导致自闭症谱系障碍（ASD）中的语言障碍。在这里，我们研究了跨情境词汇学习作为一个包括映射、保留和泛化的综合系统，分别在典型发展和自闭症中进行研究。在研究 1 中，与词汇量匹配的 TD 对照组相比，自闭症儿童在从统计对应关系中区分新单词的含义方面同样准确。在研究 2 中，两个群体都自发地利用社会和非社会注意力线索来促进和加速他们的词汇-指涉关系的映射。在研究 1 和研究 2 中，两个群体都以令人印象深刻且相当准确的方式检索和泛化单词-指涉关系的表示。尽管自闭症儿童在学习准确性的测量上与 TD 儿童表现非常相似，但在有和没有提示的学习条件下，他们识别正确指涉的速度明显较慢。这些发现表明，支持跨情境词汇学习的机制，以及它们之间的关系，在语言延迟的自闭症儿童中并没有本质上的异常。然而，生成正确反应所需的时间增加表明，这些机制可能效率较低，这可能会影响到在快速呈现视觉和听觉刺激的自然环境中学习。我们的数据支持这样的观点，即从长远来看，词汇学习是由在多个学习实例中逐渐积累单词-对象关联驱动的，这可能为设计旨在促进词汇学习的干预措施提供信息。
