Environmental context scaffolds children's semantic representation of novel words

Abstract

In their everyday lives, children encounter words and objects in meaningful environments; for example, food-related words and objects tend to appear in the kitchen. The current study incorporated this aspect of children's naturalistic word learning experience into an experimental paradigm designed to examine whether environmental context impacts the meanings children ascribe to novel nouns. Preschoolers (36–48 months, N = 46) heard labels for novel objects embedded in images of natural scenes (in the kitchen or outdoors). They were then tested using a verb-mediated prediction paradigm. Children heard sentences where one of the novel labels was preceded by either a neutral verb (“see” or “find”) or a context-related verb (“eat” or “throw”) while viewing object pairs. The results showed that children used the context-related verbs to anticipate the target noun. This pattern of results suggests that children encoded environmental context information during word learning and used it to inform their representations of the meanings of novel words.