Department of Psychology, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ 85287, USA.
University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI 53706, USA.
J Exp Child Psychol. 2020 Dec;200:104961. doi: 10.1016/j.jecp.2020.104961. Epub 2020 Aug 24.
To acquire novel words, learners often need to integrate information about word meanings across ambiguous learning events distributed in time. How does the temporal structure of those word learning events affect what learners encode? How do the effects of temporal structure differ in children and adults? In the current experiments, we asked how 4- to 7-year-old children's (N = 110) and adults' (N = 90) performance on a cross-situational word learning task is influenced by the temporal distribution of learning events. We tested participants in three training conditions, manipulating the number of trials that separated naming events for specific objects. In the Unstructured condition, the temporal distribution was varied; in the Massed condition, naming events occurred with few interleaved trials; and in the Interleaved condition, naming events occurred with many interleaved trials. Adults showed substantially larger benefits from the Massed condition than children, whereas children were equally successful at learning in the Massed and Interleaved conditions. These results provide evidence that adults differ from children in how they exploit temporal structure during cross-situational word learning.
为了习得新词，学习者通常需要整合有关词义的信息，这些信息来自于时间上分布分散的学习事件。这些词学习事件的时间结构如何影响学习者的编码？时间结构的影响在儿童和成人中有何不同？在当前的实验中，我们研究了 4 至 7 岁儿童（N=110）和成人（N=90）在跨情境词汇学习任务中的表现如何受到学习事件时间分布的影响。我们在三种训练条件下测试了参与者，即通过改变命名特定对象的事件之间的试验数量来操纵时间分布。在非结构化条件下，时间分布是变化的；在集中条件下，命名事件发生的间隔很少；在交错条件下，命名事件发生的间隔很多。成人在集中条件下比儿童获得的收益大得多，而儿童在集中和交错条件下的学习效果相同。这些结果表明，成人在跨情境词汇学习过程中如何利用时间结构与儿童不同。
