ArticleNature human behaviour2021
How young children integrate information sources to infer the meaning of words.
Article in Nature human behaviour, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 17 papers.
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Who cites it
17 citing papers in PubMed, 48 citations in OpenAlex.
- Lexical inference training for homonyms: Two randomized controlled trials for children with English as a first and an additional language.The British journal of educational psychology · 2026Trial
- The Quantity-Competence Presumption: Children Use Informativeness to Calibrate Trust and Infer Speakers' Knowledge.Developmental science · 2026Article
- How children map causal verbs to different causes across development.Nature human behaviour · 2026Article
- Rethinking the Origins of Cross-Language Effects: How Heard Verbs Influence Japanese- and English-Speaking Children's Attention to the Details of Actions.Developmental science · 2026Article
- Layers of Social Meaning: Innate, Acquired, and Deliberative Levels of Referential Signal Processing.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2026Review
- PREVIC: An adaptive parent report measure of expressive vocabulary in children between 3 and 8 years of age.Behavior research methods · 2025Article
- Pragmatics as Social Inference About Intentional Action.Open mind : discoveries in cognitive science · 2025Article
- Early Production of Imperceptible Words by Infants and Toddlers Born Deaf or Blind.Open mind : discoveries in cognitive science · 2025Article
- Inferring Word Class and Meaning From Spoken and Written Texts: A Comparison of Children With and Without Developmental Language Disorder.Journal of speech, language, and hearing research : JSLHR · 2024Article
- TANGO: A reliable, open-source, browser-based task to assess individual differences in gaze understanding in 3 to 5-year-old children and adults.Behavior research methods · 2024Article
- The impact of internal-generated contextual clues on EFL vocabulary learning: insights from EEG.Frontiers in psychology · 2024Article
- Meaning as mentalization.Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2024Review
- Combining statistics: the role of phonotactics on cross-situational word learning.Psicologia, reflexao e critica : revista semestral do Departamento de Psicologia da UFRGS · 2022Article
- Great ape communication as contextual social inference: a computational modelling perspective.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022Article
- Learning Through Processing: Toward an Integrated Approach to Early Word Learning.Annual review of linguistics · 2022Article
- A Pragmatic Account of the Weak Evidence Effect.Open mind : discoveries in cognitive science · 2022Article
- Modeling Individual Differences in Children's Information Integration During Pragmatic Word Learning.Open mind : discoveries in cognitive science · 2022Article
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Authors and funding
4 authors at 3 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Before formal education begins, children typically acquire a vocabulary of thousands of words. This learning process requires the use of many different information sources in their social environment, including their current state of knowledge and the context in which they hear words used. How is this information integrated? We specify a developmental model according to which children consider information sources in an age-specific way and integrate them via Bayesian inference. This model accurately predicted 2-5-year-old children's word learning across a range of experimental conditions in which they had to integrate three information sources. Model comparison suggests that the central locus of development is an increased sensitivity to individual information sources, rather than changes in integration ability. This work presents a developmental theory of information integration during language learning and illustrates how formal models can be used to make a quantitative test of the predictive and explanatory power of competing theories.
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Registered trials
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.