Repetition, but Not Acoustic Differentiation, Facilitates Pseudohomophone Learning by Children

ABSTRACT

Children’s ability to learn words with multiple meanings may be hindered by their adherence to a one-to-one form-to-meaning mapping bias. Previous research on children’s learning of a novel meaning for a familiar word (sometimes called a pseudohomophone) has yielded mixed results, suggesting a range of factors that may impact when children entertain a new meaning for a familiar word. One such factor is repetition of the new meaning and another is the acoustic differentiation of the two meanings. This study asked 72 4-year-old English-learning children to assign novel meanings to familiar words and manipulated how many times they heard the words with their new referents as well as whether the productions were acoustically longer than typical productions of the words. Repetition supported the learning of a pseudohomophone, but acoustic differentiation did not.

Acknowledgments

The authors thank Shanda Lauer for recording the audio stimuli, and all participants and their families for their support of this research. Comments from two anonymous reviewers and the Editor improved this article and we thank them for their suggestions. The contents of this article are the sole responsibility of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official views of NICHD or NIH.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

The complete dataset for this study is available on the Open Science Framework at https://osf.io/6q45m/.

Notes

¹ We modeled this phrasing after that used in Doherty (2004), but the use of this question opens the possibility of children using the strategy of simply selecting the object that was in the story on every trial. If they used this strategy, we would expect no differences between conditions. However, future studies may wish to include a baseline condition with no word learning, but that asks children to select the item “from the story” to compare with word learning conditions.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by Grant 1R15HD077519-01 to the first author from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH).