Mutual Exclusivity In Chinese Children’s Early Word Learning

Researchers have been interested in such a question:How can infants learn language so quickly? With the improvement of methods, early word learning has generally become the central empirical and theoretical concern of the developmental psychology. Mutual exclusivity reported by researchers is the assumption that infants will map a novel label onto a novel object rather than a familiar object in response to hearing a novel word. It is commonly agreement that ME plays an important role in early word leaning. However, it is argued that the computation in ME is based on the rejection of object with known label or on the attraction of the novelty of object.It is notable that the debate on computation in ME may be from the shortcoming of method. Recently, the intermodal preferential looking task is the main paradigm involved in the ME research. This task is used to evaluate infants’ ability of ME by their looking response on two pictures when hearing a label. The problem is that the looking response here is really based on infants’word comprehension or just their preference to novelty. Their preference to novelty maybe effect the evaluation on infants’ ME response. So, it is necessary to inspect the validity of IPLP in the research of ME.The IPLP was used in two experiments to evaluate the ME in12-month-olds and18-month-olds.1012-month-olds (M=380.4, SD=13.664) and1318-month-olds (M=534.62, SD=24.93) participated in the first experiment. They were tested in3trial conditions:familiar object-familiar object trial on known label, familiar object-novel object trial on known label, familiar object-novel object trial on unknown label. The results indicated that12-month-olds preferred to the novel object before naming, but there was no naming effect and ME response after naming.18-month-olds also preferred to the novel object before naming. On known label condition, there is no naming effect, while on unknown label condition, there is ME response. It is revealed that novelty effect was really existed.The IPLP was improved in second experiment in order to ensure the test validity of ME.1012-month-olds (M=383.22, SD=7.032) and1418-month-olds (M=544.36, SD=18.421) participated in the second experiment. They were Pre-familiared to objects and then tested in2trial condition:familiar object-familiar object trial on known label, familiar object-familiar object trial on unknown label. The results indicated that12-month-olds’s preference to novelty was disappeared. To18-month-olds, there were naming effect on known label condition and ME on unknown label condition. It is evidenced that pre-amelioration could improve the test validity of ME in IPLP task.In this research, it was discovered that novelty variable truly had effect on the measure validity of ME in IPLP task, and then we proposed the improvement on IPLP to reduce the novelty effect.