Article ID Journal Published Year Pages File Type
5040084 Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 2016 7 Pages PDF
Abstract

•We investigated the role of novelty in referent selection with novel actions.•Children select the most novel object in both novel action and novel word referent selection tasks.•Novelty plays a role in referent selection with novel actions.•Word learning relies on domain-general attentional biases that extend to action learning.

Young children are biased to select novel, name-unknown objects as referents of novel labels and to similarly favor novel, action-unknown objects as referents of novel actions. What process underlies these common behaviors? In the case of word learning, children may be driven by a novelty bias favoring novel objects as referents. Our study investigated this bias further by investigating whether novelty also affects children's selection of novel objects when a new action is given. In a pre-exposure session, 40 3- and 4-year-olds were shown eight novel objects for 1 min. In subsequent referent selection trials, children were shown two pre-exposed objects and one super-novel object and either heard a novel name or saw a novel action. The super-novel object was selected significantly more than the pre-exposed objects on both word and action trials. Our data add to the growing literature suggesting that an endogenous attentional bias to novelty plays a role in children's referent selection and demonstrates further parallels between word and action learning.

Related Topics
Social Sciences and Humanities Psychology Developmental and Educational Psychology
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