Abstract With development knowledge becomes organized according to semantic links, including early‐developing associative (e.g., juicy–apple) and gradually developing taxonomic links (e.g., apple–pear). Word co‐occurrence regularities may foster these links: Associative links may form from direct co‐occurrence (e.g., juicy–apple), and taxonomic links from shared co‐occurrence (e.g., apple and pear co‐occur with juicy). Four experiments (2017–2020) investigated this possibility with 4‐ to 8‐year‐olds ( N = 148, 82 female) and adults ( N = 116, 35 female) in a U.S. city with 58.6% White; 29.0% Black, and 5.8% Asian demographics. Results revealed earlier development of the abilities to form direct ( d s > 0.536) than the abilities to form shared co‐occurrence‐based links ( d s > 1.291). We argue that the asynchronous development of abilities to form co‐occurrence‐based links may explain developmental changes in semantic organization.
Recent years have seen a flourishing of Natural Language Processing models that can mimic many aspects of human language fluency. These models harness a simple, decades-old idea: It is possible to learn a lot about word meanings just from exposure to language, because words similar in meaning are used in language in similar ways. The successes of these models raise the intriguing possibility that exposure to word use in language also shapes the word knowledge that children amass during development. However, this possibility is strongly challenged by the fact that models use language input and learning mechanisms that may be unavailable to children. Across three studies, we found that unrealistically complex input and learning mechanisms are unnecessary. Instead, simple regularities of word use in children’s language input that they have the capacity to learn can foster knowledge about word meanings. Thus, exposure to language may play a simple but powerful role in children’s growing word knowledge.
Category‐based induction is a hallmark of mature cognition; however, little is known about its origins. This study evaluated the hypothesis that category‐based induction is related to semantic development. Computational studies suggest that early on there is little differentiation among concepts, but learning and development lead to increased differentiation based on taxonomic relatedness. This study reports findings from a new task aimed to (a) examine this putative increase in semantic differentiation and (b) test whether individual differences in semantic differentiation are related to category‐based induction in 4‐ to 7‐year‐old children ( N = 85). The results provide the first empirical evidence of an age‐related increase in differentiation of representations of animal concepts and suggest that category‐based induction is related to increased semantic differentiation.
Early word learning may get off the ground by mapping words to referents that accompany them. For example, a child might learn the meaning of the word “apple” from hearing “apple” in the presence of apples. However, when a word occurs without a handy referent, the other words that accompany it might provide a rich source of information about its meaning, because words similar in meaning occur in similar contexts of other words. For example, “apple” and “mango” both co-occur with words such as “juicy” and “sweet”. Therefore, a child who has mapped “apple” to apples but has never seen a mango may nonetheless learn that a mango is something similar to an apple from their shared co-occurrence with “juicy” or “sweet”. Thus, it is possible to learn new words by linking them to known words that occur in similar contexts. Such learning might be critical for extending word learning well beyond mapping individual words to referents. However, we know little about the learning mechanisms that support learning new words from context. The current work highlights, implements and contrasts two candidate mechanisms for learning words from context. The goal is to provide a foundation for evaluating whether these mechanisms play important roles in word learning during child development
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