The Impact Of Strength Of Words-referents Association On Cross-situational Word Learning Of16and20Months Old Infants

The field of language acquisition has taken special interest in the idea of statistical learning because of the rapidity with which infants typically acquire their native language, despite the complexity of the structures to be acquired.In recent years, some researchers have found that language acquisition benefits from learners’sensitivity to the statistical information through experimental studies.The human learners has a strong statistical learning ability, adults and children are sensitive to the structure of information input. In early word learning, The strength of words-referents association effects on Cross-Situational word learning.In our study, we have adopted Intermodal Preferential Looking Paradigm to investigat the effect of strength of words-referents association on infants’ cross-situational word learning.In Experiment1,20-month-old infants learned with the low strength of assocition of words-referents across situation and failed to show the naming effect of target referents which found that it is possible that the perceptual preference disturbed the word learning. In Experiment2, we improved experimental materials by balancing the perception preference of four objects,the20-month-old infant excluded the interference of the perceptual preference in cross-situational word learning,but still failed in cross-situational word learning. In Experiment3, we added one pair of new different word-referent, and increased the strength of the association of words-referents. The20-month-old infant carried out cross-situational word learning, and learned better than the word learning in the low strenth of words-referents. In Experiment4we let16-month-old infants learn words-referents with the high strength of assocition of words-referents across situation.We found that16-month-old infants in the low strength of association failed in cross-situational word learning. With the same strength of association of words-referents,20-month-old infants learned better than than16-month-old in cross-situational word learning. The ability of cross-situational word learning has the developmental trends as infants’age increasing By4expriments, we got the conclusions as follows:(1) the strength of association of words-referents affects cross-situational word learning,20-month-old infants can learn words via high strength of association of words-referents across-situation but failed with low strength of association of words-referents;(2)16-month-old infants failed with low strength of association of words-referents.(3) With the same strength, the ability of cross-situational word learning of20-month-old infants is better than that of16month-old infants.