TY - JOUR

T1 - How young children integrate information sources to infer the meaning of words

AU - Bohn, Manuel

AU - Tessler, Michael Henry

AU - Merrick, Megan

AU - Frank, Michael C.

N1 - Funding Information: M.B. received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement no. 749229. M.H.T. was funded by the National Science Foundation SBE Postdoctoral Research Fellowship grant no. 1911790. M.C.F. was supported by a Jacobs Foundation Advanced Research Fellowship and the Zhou Fund for Language and Cognition. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. Publisher Copyright: © 2021, The Author(s).

PY - 2021/8/1

Y1 - 2021/8/1

N2 - Before formal education begins, children typically acquire a vocabulary of thousands of words. This learning process requires the use of many different information sources in their social environment, including their current state of knowledge and the context in which they hear words used. How is this information integrated? We specify a developmental model according to which children consider information sources in an age-specific way and integrate them via Bayesian inference. This model accurately predicted 2–5-year-old children’s word learning across a range of experimental conditions in which they had to integrate three information sources. Model comparison suggests that the central locus of development is an increased sensitivity to individual information sources, rather than changes in integration ability. This work presents a developmental theory of information integration during language learning and illustrates how formal models can be used to make a quantitative test of the predictive and explanatory power of competing theories.

AB - Before formal education begins, children typically acquire a vocabulary of thousands of words. This learning process requires the use of many different information sources in their social environment, including their current state of knowledge and the context in which they hear words used. How is this information integrated? We specify a developmental model according to which children consider information sources in an age-specific way and integrate them via Bayesian inference. This model accurately predicted 2–5-year-old children’s word learning across a range of experimental conditions in which they had to integrate three information sources. Model comparison suggests that the central locus of development is an increased sensitivity to individual information sources, rather than changes in integration ability. This work presents a developmental theory of information integration during language learning and illustrates how formal models can be used to make a quantitative test of the predictive and explanatory power of competing theories.

KW - Psychology

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85109323744&partnerID=8YFLogxK

U2 - 10.1038/s41562-021-01145-1

DO - 10.1038/s41562-021-01145-1

M3 - Journal articles

C2 - 34211148

AN - SCOPUS:85109323744

VL - 5

SP - 1046

EP - 1054

JO - Nature Human Behaviour

JF - Nature Human Behaviour

SN - 2397-3374

IS - 8

ER -