Journal article
Ruxue Shao, D. Gentner
Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, 2016
Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, 2016
Semantic Scholar
DBLP
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APA
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Shao, R., & Gentner, D. (2016). Structural Alignment in Incidental Word Learning. Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society.
Chicago/Turabian
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Shao, Ruxue, and D. Gentner. “Structural Alignment in Incidental Word Learning.” Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (2016).
MLA
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Shao, Ruxue, and D. Gentner. “Structural Alignment in Incidental Word Learning.” Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, 2016.
BibTeX Click to copy
@article{ruxue2016a,
title = {Structural Alignment in Incidental Word Learning},
year = {2016},
journal = {Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society},
author = {Shao, Ruxue and Gentner, D.}
}
Abstract
Young children can sometimes acquire new vocabulary words with only limited, indirect exposure (Carey & Bartlett, 1978). We propose that structural alignment processes lead to fluent detection of commonalities and differences that facilitate incidental word learning. To test this, we adapted the Carey and Bartlett paradigm, varying the alignability of the objects that 4year-olds saw while hearing the novel word chromium. In Experiment 1, children in the High-Alignment condition were significantly better than those in the Low-Alignment condition at identifying chromium objects in a subsequent task. In Experiment 2, we ruled out an alternative account by equalizing the overall amount of information presented to the two groups. We also found that the advantage of high alignment persisted after two-to-four days. These results suggest that structural alignment is a mechanism by which children can learn word meanings even in incidental word learning situations.
