Remember dax? Relations between children's cross-situational word learning, memory, and language abilities

- This research investigated children's CSWL from a developmental systems perspective.
- The experiments examined relations between CSWL and several cognitive domains.
- The results revealed that global language and memory abilities contribute to CSWL.
- The findings revealed that several task-specific memory abilities contribute to CSWL.
- Computational models should account for children's developing cognitive abilities.

Learning new words is a difficult task. Children are able to resolve the ambiguity of the task and map words to referents by tracking co-occurrence probabilities across multiple moments in time, a behavior termed cross-situational word learning (CSWL). Although we observe developments in CSWL abilities across childhood, the cognitive processes that drive individual and developmental change have yet to be identified. This research tested a developmental systems account by examining whether multiple cognitive systems co-contribute to children's CSWL. The results of two experiments revealed that multiple cognitive domains, such as memory and language abilities, are likely to drive the development of CSWL above and beyond children's age. The results also revealed that memory abilities are likely to be particularly important above and beyond other cognitive abilities. These findings have implications for theories and computational models of CSWL, which typically do not account for individual children's cognitive capacities or changes in cognitive capacities across time.