A multi-method investigation into learning words from social cues during discourse

Abstract

Children learn words in a social environment. In my dissertation, I examine how caregiver social cues facilitate toddlers’ word learning in settings that mirror their typical, dynamic learning environments. In Chapter 1, I overview how previous research has investigated the enhancement of word learning from observing behavioral cues during exposure, and the potential mechanisms to explain this benefit. In Chapter 2, I investigate whether children display a benefit in novel word learning from social cues across discourse topics, and not only through successive learning trials on a single topic. In Chapter 3, I generalize my findings from Chapter 2 by investigating how caregivers’ natural productions of social cues may systematically benefit children’s word learning. And finally, in Chapter 4, I explore whether neural synchrony (the alignment of neural activity) within caregiver-child interactions has the potential to explain the relationship between social cue observations and word learning. Together, my findings suggest that, despite the information-density and messiness of natural learning environments, social cues serve to reduce referential ambiguity and support children’s word learning within caregiver-child interactions when the structure of discourse is taken into account.