Attentional Control and Early Word Learning

Attentional Control and Early Word Learning Hanako Yoshida (yoshida@uh.edu) Duc N. Tran (crystalxlite@yahoo.com) Department of Psychology, University of Houston Houston, TX 77204-5022 USA Viridiana Benitez (vlbenite@indiana.edu) Megumi Kuwabara (mekuwaba@indiana.edu) Psychological and Brain Sciences, Indiana University Bloomington, IN 47405 USA Abstract There has been increasing interest in the role of early attention in the context of word learning. There has also been growing interest in attentional differences between bilinguals and monolinguals. The present study examined the relationship between mutual exclusivity and attentional control by comparing bilingual children whose attentional control is relatively advanced to age- matched monolingual children. The novel adjective learning paradigm was the word-learning measure and the Attention Network Test was the measure of attentional control. Three-year-old monolingual and bilingual children with similar vocabulary development participated. The results replicate earlier work on advanced attentional control among bilingual children and suggest that better performances in novel adjective learning by bilingual children might be due to attentional control. These findings support the importance of attention in early word mapping. The results add to a growing body of literature on the potential relevance of bilingualism in early word learning. Keywords: Attentional learning; early word learning; adjective learning paradigm; mutual exclusivity; selective attention Attentional Shifting and Word Learning A growing body of experimental literature (mostly concerning adults) indicates that effective attentional control optimizes learning, especially in complex scenes (e.g., Cowan, Fristoe, Elliot, Brunner, & Saults, 2006). In the developmental literature, there has been interest in the role of effective attention shifting in learning, particularly in the domain of word learning. Because different kinds of words refer to different kinds of properties (e.g., nouns to shapes or whole objects, adjectives to properties such as color or texture), being able to shift attention seems an important aspect of word learning (Au, 1990). Indeed, a number of studies have documented that by the time children are 2 years old, they shift attention to different kinds of properties for different kinds of entities and in the context of different kinds of words (Graham, Williams, & Huber, 1999; Landau, Smith, & Jones, 1988, 1998; Soja, 1992; Soja Carey, & Spelke, 1991; Yoshida & Smith, 2003, Some accounts of this effective attentional shifting refer to mapping principles for learning words (e.g., Bloom, 2000; Carey, 1978; Markman, 1989). One such principle is mutual exclusivity (Markman & Wachtel, 1988): In the context of a known word and referent, a novel word shifts attention to a novel referent. Mutual exclusivity is pervasive in early word learning, helping the learning of new nouns, but it has also been suggested as a reason why young word learners have difficulty learning adjectives (e.g., Carey, 1978; Markman, 1989; Regier, 1996). For example, young learners who know that a horse is called “horse” might reject the label “brown” being applied to it. This one label–one object constraint has long been considered a positive constraint on early word learning that promotes the learning of nouns. Also, it may help more advanced word learners learn adjectives. Older children, when challenged with two labels for a single object, will effectively shift attention to a nonshape property (if “horse” means HORSE, then “brown” must mean something about the horse; see Waxman, 2001; Waxman & Klibanof, 2000). Although the earlier view saw these constraints as lexically specific and possibly innate (Markman, 1989), more recent work suggests that the effect is related to learning through competitive attentional processes (Halberda, 2009; Hollich, Hirsh- Pasek, Tucker, & Golinkoff, 2000; Plunkett, 1998; Smith, 2000; Yoshida & Hanania, 2007). If mutual exclusivity emerges because of competitive processes among words and referents that arise in on- line comprehension, then these processes—and their relation to effective attentional control in word learning—should be related to the learner’s history of experiences in resolving competitions among words and referents. This, in turn, suggests that the development of mutual exclusivity may benefit from bilingualism and attentional control more generally.