Familiarity effect of Chinese and English linguistic labels on cross-situational word learning in infants and adults

• Main Authors: I-ChenChen, 陳怡蓁
• Other Authors: Jon-Fan Hu
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2013
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/55668422584984200986

碩士 === 國立成功大學 === 心理學系認知科學碩士班 === 101 === Recent studies had shown that adults and infants are capable of linking words and referents in cross-situational word learning (Smith ＆ Yu, 2008; Yu ＆ Smith, 2007). Also, the underlying statistical mechanisms are tightly linked with dynamic process of visual attention(Yu ＆ Smith, 2011). This research aimed to investigate adult and infant individual differences of cross-situational word learning performance on the visual attention level as well as to understand the effects of phonological experience on cross-situational word learning in both ages. A series of four experiments were designed to train adults and infants with cross-situational word learning paradigm, in which they had to find the correct word-referent pairs. Their eye movements were accurately recorded using eye-tracker and were quantified by the index from Information Theory called Entropy. Native (Chinese) or non-native (English) linguistic labels were manipulated in different groups of adult and infant participants, and better label-referent associations for native linguistic group were expected due to learners’ linguistic learning experience. There are three main findings in the results. First, similar to the previous studies, individual differences in the task performances were related to the attention during learning, in the way that strong learners’ eye-movement entropy declined significantly while weak learners’ did not. Second, phonological knowledge indeed could facilitate associative learning of native linguistic labels in both adults and infants, leading to better associations between these labels and referents. Third, native linguistic labels impact attention pattern of adult learners at the very beginning so that their eye-movement entropy started off lower than those in non-native linguistic label group. Our research showed that familiarity with the sound structure of the labels created more attention resource focusing on building the association, thus it increased the efficiency in learning the word pairs. Through integrating dynamic process of attention with associative learning, statistical word learning mechanisms were fully discussed in the research.