Attentional Highlighting as a Mechanism behind Early Word Learning

Attentional Highlighting as a Mechanism behind Early Word Learning Hanako Yoshida (yoshida@uh.edu) Department of Psychology, University of Houston, 126 Heyne Building Houston, TX 77204-5022 USA Rima Hanania (rhanania@indiana.edu) Psychological and Brain Sciences and Program in Cognitive Science, Indiana University Bloomington, IN 47405 USA Abstract children’s early language learning. How might attentional mechanisms work to guide selection to relevant information, and what role do these processes play in children’s early word learning? Research suggests that part of the answer to the question of how selective attention is guided lies in understanding that what we learn to attend to in one moment and context affects what we attend to in a later moment with an overlapping context. There is strong evidence in the adult literature to support the idea that attention is guided by past learning, and by the relationship between the current moment and what was learned in the past. One phenomenon where this is apparent is Highlighting (Kruschke, 1996.) Of particular interest to this paper is the attention-shifting mechanism that accounts for Highlighting and which, broadly described, operates by reallocating attention to new information if old information is paired with a novel outcome. This type of attention- shifting mechanism could be very relevant to early word learning in children, and might provide a key ingredient that allows children to bootstrap themselves into language learning without the need for higher-level syntactic knowledge. Could general mechanisms of selective attention and appropriate attention shifting account for language learning phenomena without recourse to assumptions about children’s knowledge of language structure? We pursue this question in the domain of adjective learning. First we discuss adjective learning and present one particular finding. We then briefly describe the adult phenomenon, Highlighting, drawing parallels between it and adjective learning. This leads us to consider the attentional explanation for Highlighting to suggest a type of mechanism that could also underlie word learning. We test the plausibility of such a mechanism in two experiments and discuss the results. This paper investigates the role of general attention-shifting mechanisms in children’s early adjective learning. A novel version of an adjective-learning paradigm was used to probe whether attentional mechanisms could account for early adjective learning without recourse to high-level syntactic knowledge. Two- and 3-year-olds participated. One condition removed all syntactic information by presenting words in incorrect syntactic order, but with explicit naming of known properties. According to the attention-shifting account, activation of past learned associations through the mention of known words should focus attention on the right association: novel adjective to novel property. Younger children with less linguistic experience successfully learned novel adjectives in this condition, supporting the attentional account. We discuss the attention-shifting mechanism by analogy to attentional highlighting, which accounts for the phenomenon of highlighting in the adult associative learning literature. Keywords: Attentional learning; highlighting phenomena; early word learning; selective attention. Attentional mechanisms in early word learning Attention to relevant information is central to all learning. Selectively attending to appropriate information enables quick learning, generalization to new situations, and successful decision making; attending to irrelevant information, on the other hand, can lead to error and to a failure to learn. In language learning, mapping words to referents is a key process of learning words, and selective attention to the appropriate referent for a given label is crucial for successful word learning. For nouns such as the word “cup”, for instance, attention to the correct referent object, a cup, and the relevant feature of that object, its shape, facilitates learning the noun. For adjectives such as the word “red”, attention to the correct feature of an object, its color, facilitates learning the adjective. Selective attention to incorrect information, on the other hand, e.g. the shape of a cup on hearing the word “red”, would lead to error in interpreting the meaning of “cup” or the meaning of “red” in future settings. Given the importance of selective attention in word learning, it is essential to understand the role of selective attention mechanisms in Adjective Learning Different kinds of words refer to different kinds of meanings. It has been suggested that early-learned noun categories are most likely organized by shape (Samuelson & Smith, 1999); adjectives typically refer to other properties, those that can vary within an object category (Klibanoff & Waxman, 2000). Relative to common nouns,