Effects of Pre-Exposure to Object and Label During Word Learning

Abstract

Infants learn novel word-object pairings better when they have prior familiarity with either the label (Swingley, 2007; Graf Estes et al., 2007) or the object (Fennell, 2012; Kucker & Samuelson, 2012). This suggests that infants encode information about labels and objects, even when they do not know what they refer to or how they are labelled, and that they can use this knowledge for later word learning. The present study examines whether mere exposure to object and label facilitates word learning or whether consistency of cooccurrence between label and object also matters. We familiarized German 15- to 17-month-old infants with a novel object and a novel label in an animated story without explicitly associating the two with each other. Object and label merely co-occurred in the story. Subsequently, the infants participated in a word learning task. Results show that infants only showed evidence of word learning when the label and object presented in the story were also paired in the word learning task, suggesting that mere exposure to label and object has only limited effects on word learning and that infants readily use co-occurrence information to form label-object associations.