Three- to six-year-old children learn novel verbs and nouns from a single exposure following core knowledge violations, including outside the laboratory¶

Claim · All claims
Evidence · 1 study (2 entries) · review r2 · q2
Currency · newest study 2019 · not yet checked against its sources · not reviewed by a person

Subclaims¶

q2 i? Children who saw an expected spatiotemporal continuity outcome performed at chance on a novel verb test, while children who saw the surprising outcome robustly learned the verb from one exposure. → Stahl Aimee E. 2019 q2 i? The effect replicated with a featural continuity violation and noun labels, and controls ruled out novelty or attraction explanations. → Stahl Aimee E. 2019 (2)

Evidence¶

Stahl Aimee E. 2019¶

Stahl Aimee E., Feigenson Lisa. (2019). Violations of Core Knowledge Shape Early Learning. Topics in Cognitive Science. https://doi.org/10.1111/tops.12389

q2 · i? · review · r2

Study of 3- to 6-year-olds in a busy science museum (Stahl & Feigenson, 2017): children saw a toy revealed under the original or the other cup, heard the novel verb "blicked," and were then asked to point to the cup that could blick the toy.

"children who saw the expected outcome performed at chance, showing no evidence of having learned the novel word. Again, this was as predicted because we had designed the task to be challenging. But children who saw the surprising outcome robustly learned the novel verb, despite having had just one exposure"

Stahl Aimee E. 2019 (2)¶

Stahl Aimee E., Feigenson Lisa. (2019). Violations of Core Knowledge Shape Early Learning. Topics in Cognitive Science. https://doi.org/10.1111/tops.12389

q2 · i? · review · r2

Replication within the same museum study using a featural continuity violation and noun labels; additional experiments confirmed children truly learned the labels rather than being attracted to surprising objects.

"We also replicated these findings with a different core knowledge violation (featural continuity, in which an object appeared to magically change its features) and a different type of verbal label (nouns; e.g., the blue cups were labeled as blickers)"

Discussion¶

Learner Variables¶

• Vocabulary — outcome: instruction changes it

Related Claims¶

• Impossible but not improbable events boost children's word learning, with step-like rather than graded performance — related
• Core knowledge violations may be 'moderately impossible,' aligning with the Goldilocks effect on attention allocation — related
• Eleven-month-old infants learn a new object-sound mapping after a surprising core knowledge violation but not after an expected outcome — related
• Eleven-month-old infants who see a core knowledge violation preferentially explore the violating object over a novel distractor — related
• Preliminary evidence that infants do not generalize surprise-induced exploration to same-category exemplars — related
• Infants' exploratory behavior after a core knowledge violation is tailored to the type of violation seen — related
• Learning enhancements from core knowledge violations are entity-specific: no benefit for unrelated bystander objects — related
• Students' surprise at measurement values was overwhelmingly expressed by identifying an outlier or extreme/unusual value — related