Effects of causal information on the early word learning: Efficiency and longevity

This study examines two accounts of why causal information facilitates early learning, one focusing on its attracting attention at the time of encoding and the other on its enhancing memory through coherent elaboration. Three-year-olds were taught novel words along with either causally-rich or causally-weak descriptions of their referents until each child reached a specific learning criterion. Children reached this criterion in fewer trials in the causally-rich than in the causally-weak condition. However, when children's memory for the newly learned words was subsequently tested after a lengthy delay, no differences in performance were detected. Causal information therefore appears to support early word learning primarily by enhancing the efficiency of initial encoding, rather than by enhancing the longevity of lexical-semantic representations. These results provide greater support for the attention-based than the coherent elaboration-account and further suggest that encoding may be a principal limiting factor in children's word learning.