Abstract
Recent work asked if visual cues facilitate word segmentation in adults and infants (Thiessen, 2010). While adults showed better word segmentation when presented with a regular visual cue (consistent mapping between words and objects), infants did not. This difference was attributed to infants' lack of understanding that objects have labels. Alternatively, infants’ performance could reflect their difficulty with tracking and integrating multiple multimodal cues. We contrasted these two accounts by looking at the effect of visual cues on word segmentation in adults and across childhood (6–12 years). We found that older children (Mage 10;7) benefitted from the regular visual cues, but younger children (Mage 7;10), who already knew that objects have labels, did not. Knowing that objects have labels was not enough to use visual cues as an aid for segmentation. These findings show that the ability to integrate multimodal cues develops during childhood, and it is not yet adult-like in children.
| Original language | American English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 606-620 |
| Number of pages | 15 |
| Journal | Cognitive Science |
| Volume | 42 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - May 2018 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:We wish to thank Noam Siegelman for his help with the statistical analyses, as well as the research assistants at the Living Lab, the parents and children who participated, and the Bloomfield Science Museum. The research was funded by the Israeli Science Foundation grant number 584/16 awarded to the second author.
Publisher Copyright:
Copyright © 2017 Cognitive Science Society, Inc.
Keywords
- Audio–visual input
- Language development
- Language learning
- Statistical learning
- Word learning
- Word segmentation