ArticleJournal of experimental child psychology2020
Sometimes it is better to know less: How known words influence referent selection and retention in 18- to 24-month-old children.
Article in Journal of experimental child psychology, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 7 papers.
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
7 citing papers in PubMed.
- Investigating Visual Attention Differences and Relationships with Accuracy During Word Learning in Autistic and Neurotypical Children.Journal of autism and developmental disorders · 2025Article
- Overlooked Input for Word Learning: Examining the Role of Attention on Non-Target Objects During Object Labeling.IEEE International Conference on Development and Learning. IEEE International Conference on Development and Learning · 2025Article
- Understanding preschoolers' word learning success in different scenarios: disambiguation meets statistical learning and eBook reading.Frontiers in psychology · 2023Article
- Emotion words link faces to emotional scenarios in early childhood.Emotion (Washington, D.C.) · 2022Article
- Toward a Precision Science of Word Learning: Understanding Individual Vocabulary Pathways.Child development perspectives · 2021Article
- Formal theories clarify the complex: Generalizing a neural process account of the interaction of visual exploration and word learning in infancy.Child developmentArticle
- Selective Attention in Early Word Learning: An Eye-Tracking Study on Viewing Naturalistic Egocentric Scenes.Infancy : the official journal of the International Society on Infant StudiesArticle
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Young children are surprisingly good word learners. Despite their relative lack of world knowledge and limited vocabularies, they consistently map novel words to novel referents and, at later ages, show retention of these new word-referent pairs. Prior work has implicated the use of mutual exclusivity constraints and novelty biases, which require that children use knowledge of well-known words to disambiguate uncertain naming situations. The current study, however, presents evidence that weaker vocabulary knowledge during the initial exposure to a new word may be better for retention of new mappings. Children aged 18-24 months selected referents for novel words in the context of foil stimuli that varied in their lexical strength and novelty: well-known items (e.g., shoe), just-learned weakly known items (e.g., wif), and completely novel items. Referent selection performance was significantly reduced on trials with weakly known foil items. Surprisingly, however, children subsequently showed above-chance retention for novel words mapped in the context of weakly known competitors compared with those mapped with strongly known competitors or with completely novel competitors. We discuss implications for our understanding of word learning constraints and how children use known words and novelty during word learning.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.