Just a minute for children to learn new word

A team of psychologists from the University of Pennsylvania said that children come to the correct meaning of words in moments of insight, rather than gradually through repetition.

In their study, pre-school children and adults were asked to watch short video clips of parents interacting with their children, with the sound muted except for when the parent said a particular word, which they were asked to guess.

In the first experiment the target word was replaced by a beep. If more than half of the children and adults correctly guessed the target word, it was labelled high informative; if less than a third did, it was low informative. Seven per cent of the video clips were high informative and 90 per cent low informative.

In the second experiment, children and adults were shown a series of high informative and low informative clips, and multiple target words were replaced with nonsense words. When a high informative clip was played early on, it gave participants the opportunity to learn the correct word. However, when they viewed a low informative clip first, they tended to guess incorrectly.

The researchers said that when a high informative clip was played first, it helped participants 'lock in' the correct meaning of words. With a low informative clip they had no plausible alternative meanings from earlier clips they could refer to.

The third experiment, where children and adults were shown clips they had guessed incorrectly days before, suggested that it is necessary for children to hold incorrect meanings to learn words.

Further information

'How words can and cannot be learned by observation' is published in the 16 May issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal.