Grounding Statistical Learning in Context: The Effects of Learning and Retrieval Contexts on Cross-situational Word Learning

摘要

Natural language environments usually provide structured contexts for learning. The current study examined the effects of semantically-themed contexts - in both learning and retrieval phases - on statistical word learning. Results from two experiments consistently showed that participants had higher performance in semantically-themed learning contexts. In contrast, themed retrieval contexts did not affect performance. Our work suggests that word learners are sensitive to statistical regularities at more than one level: not just at the level of individual word-object co-occurrences, but also at another level containing a whole network of associations among objects and their properties.