TY - GEN
T1 - Discourse continuity promotes children's learning of new objects labels
AU - Schwab, Jessica F.
AU - Lew-Williams, Casey
N1 - Funding Information:
Thank you to the participating families and to Jessica Quinter for all of her help with testing participants and coding videos. We also thank Eva Fourakis, Carolyn Mazzei, and the rest of the Princeton Baby Lab for their administrative assistance. This work was supported by grants to C.L.W. from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (R03HD079779), the American Speech-Language-Hearing Foundation, and the American Hearing Research Foundation.
Publisher Copyright:
© CogSci 2017.
PY - 2017
Y1 - 2017
N2 - The present study examined the influence of continuity of reference (i.e., discourse continuity) on children's learning of new objects labels. Four-year-old children were taught three new label/objects pairs, where the speaker's references to objects were either continuous (i.e., clusters of utterances referred to the same object) or discontinuous (i.e., no two sequential sentences referred to the same object). In two experiments, children learned new word/object mappings more successfully when object labels were accompanied by continuous references to the same object. This research reveals how discourse cues support children's encoding of new words, and in doing so, advances our understanding of the specific features of parents' language input that facilitate children's language development.
AB - The present study examined the influence of continuity of reference (i.e., discourse continuity) on children's learning of new objects labels. Four-year-old children were taught three new label/objects pairs, where the speaker's references to objects were either continuous (i.e., clusters of utterances referred to the same object) or discontinuous (i.e., no two sequential sentences referred to the same object). In two experiments, children learned new word/object mappings more successfully when object labels were accompanied by continuous references to the same object. This research reveals how discourse cues support children's encoding of new words, and in doing so, advances our understanding of the specific features of parents' language input that facilitate children's language development.
KW - child-directed speech
KW - discourse continuity
KW - word learning
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85077484444&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=85077484444&partnerID=8YFLogxK
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:85077484444
T3 - CogSci 2017 - Proceedings of the 39th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society: Computational Foundations of Cognition
SP - 3101
EP - 3106
BT - CogSci 2017 - Proceedings of the 39th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society
PB - The Cognitive Science Society
T2 - 39th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society: Computational Foundations of Cognition, CogSci 2017
Y2 - 26 July 2017 through 29 July 2017
ER -