This type of learning, commonly termed cross-situational word learning (XSWL), appears staggering when one considers that the world presents learners with a seemingly infinite number of candidate referents for a single word in any one moment in time ( Quine, 1960). Humans are powerful statistical learners, and through this ability can implicitly derive the most likely referent of a novel word based on the likelihood of a candidate referent occurring simultaneously with an auditory word. Some words are learned implicitly, by tracking the occurrence of an auditory word across multiple presentations in the context of multiple candidate referents. While many of these words are learned explicitly, through instruction or clear, coinciding presentation of the word and its referent, not all words are learned in this manner. Typically, a person has learned 10s of 1000s of words by adulthood. We discuss evidence for this bilingual advantage as a language-specific or general advantage. Specifically, all participants failed to learn vowel contrasts differentiated by vowel height.
#ARE MONOLINGUAL ENGLISH SPEAKERS AT A DISADVANTAGE TRIAL#
Additionally, response patterns to the different trial types revealed a relative difficulty for vowel minimal pairs than consonant minimal pairs, replicating the pattern found in monolinguals by Escudero et al. This supports that bilingualism fosters a wide range of cognitive advantages that may benefit implicit word learning. Furthermore, bilinguals were overall more accurate than monolinguals. Both groups learned the novel word-referent mappings, providing evidence that cross-situational word learning is a learning strategy also available to bilingual adults. Here, we compared monolinguals’ and bilinguals’ performance on a cross-situational word learning paradigm that featured phonologically distinct word pairs (e.g., BON-DEET) and phonologically similar word pairs that varied by a single consonant or vowel segment (e.g., BON-TON, DEET-DIT, respectively). While past studies have investigated this as a learning mechanism for infants and monolingual adults, bilinguals’ cross-situational word learning abilities have yet to be tested. To succeed at cross-situational word learning, learners must infer word-object mappings by attending to the statistical co-occurrences of novel objects and labels across multiple encounters.
1The MARCS Institute for Brain, Behaviour and Development, Western Sydney University, Penrith, NSW, Australia.
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