An official website of the United States government
Abstract What maximizes instructional impact in early childhood? We propose a simple intervention employing “Pedagogical Questions”. We explore whether swapping some instructional language with questions in psychosomatic storybooks improves preschoolers’ memory, learning, and generalization. Seventy-two preschoolers were randomly assigned to one of three conditions and were read storybooks employing eitherDirect Instruction,Pedagogical Questions, orControlcontent. Posttest measures of psychosomatic understanding, judgments about the possibility of psychosomatic events, and memory for storybook details showed that children in thePedagogical Questionscondition demonstrated greater memory for relevant storybook details and improved psychosomatic understanding. Our results suggest that pedagogical questions are a relatively simple educational manipulation to improve memory, learning, and transfer of theory-rich content.
more »
« less
Of Mouses and Mans: A Test of Errorless Versus Error‐Based Learning in Children
Abstract For both adults and children, learning from one's mistakes (error‐based learning) has been shown to be advantageous over avoiding errors altogether (errorless learning) in pedagogical settings. However, it remains unclear whether this advantage carries over to nonpedagogical settings in children, who mostly learn language in such settings. Using irregular plurals (e.g., “mice”) as a test case, we conducted a corpus analysis (N= 227) and two preregistered experiments (N= 56,N= 99), to investigate the potency of error‐based learning as a mechanism for language acquisition in 3‐ and 4‐year‐old children. The results of the corpus analysis showed that incidental feedback after errors, in the form of caregivers’ reformulations of children's errors, was relatively infrequent, had modest informational value, and was rarely used by children to correct their errors immediately. The following two experiments contrasted error‐based learning with errorless learning, where the correct utterance was modeled for the child before a potential error was committed. The results showed that error‐based learning was not always effective, and when it was, it was certainly not superior to errorless learning. Collectively, these findings question the extension of the benefits of error‐based learning from pedagogical to nonpedagogical settings and define constraints under which one mechanism may be more beneficial to learning than the other.
more »
« less
- Award ID(s):
- 2317121
- PAR ID:
- 10618702
- Publisher / Repository:
- Wiley
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Cognitive Science
- Volume:
- 48
- Issue:
- 11
- ISSN:
- 0364-0213
- Subject(s) / Keyword(s):
- child language learning, pluralization, overregularization, errorless learning, error-based learning, reformulation, corpus analysis
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
More Like this
-
-
Language can affect cognition, but through what mechanism? Substantial past research has focused on how labeling can elicit categorical representation during online processing. We focus here on a particularly powerful type of language—relational language—and show that relational language can enhance relational representation in children through an embodied attention mechanism. Four-year-old children were given a color-location conjunction task, in which they were asked to encode a two-color square, split either vertically or horizontally (e.g., red on the left, blue on the right), and later recall the same configuration from its mirror reflection. During the encoding phase, children in the experimental condition heard relational language (e.g., “Red is on the left of blue”), while those in the control condition heard generic non-relational language (e.g., “Look at this one, look at it closely”). At recall, children in the experimental condition were more successful at choosing the correct relational representation between the two colors compared to the control group. Moreover, they exhibited different attention patterns as predicted by the attention shift account of relational representation (Franconeri et al., 2012). To test the sustained effect of language and the role of attention, during the second half of the study, the experimental condition was given generic non-relational language. There was a sustained advantage in the experimental condition for both behavioral accuracies and signature attention patterns. Overall, our findings suggest that relational language enhances relational representation by guiding learners’ attention, and this facilitative effect persists over time even in the absence of language. Implications for the mechanism of how relational language can enhance the learning of relational systems (e.g., mathematics, spatial cognition) by guiding attention will be discussed.more » « less
-
Abstract Burgeoning evidence suggests that when children observe data, they use knowledge of the demonstrator's intent to augment learning. We propose that the effects of social learning may go beyond cases where children observe data, to cases where they receive no new information at all. We present a model of how simply asking a question a second time may lead to belief revision, when the questioner is expected to know the correct answer. We provide an analysis of the CHILDES corpus to show that these neutral follow‐up questions are used in parent–child conversations. We then present three experiments investigating 4‐ and 5‐year‐old children's reactions to neutral follow‐up questions posed by ignorant or knowledgeable questioners. Children were more likely to change their answers in response to a neutral follow‐up question from a knowledgeable questioner than an ignorant one. We discuss the implications of these results in the context of common practices in legal, educational, and experimental psychological settings.more » « less
-
Abstract This study examined how inferences about epistemic competence and generalized labeling errors influence children’s selective word learning. Three- to 4-year-olds (N = 128) learned words from informants who asked questions about objects, mentioning either correct or incorrect labels. Such questions do not convey stark differences in informants’ epistemic competence. Inaccurate labels, however, generate error signals that can lead to weaker encoding of novel information. Preschoolers retained novel labels from both informants but were slower to respond in the Inaccurate Labeler condition. When the test procedure was not sensitive to the strength of information encoding, children performed above chance in both conditions and their response times did not differ. These results suggest that epistemic-level inferences and error generalizations influence preschoolers’ selective word learning concurrently.more » « less
-
Children regularize inconsistent probabilistic patterns in linguistic input, yet they also acquire and match probabilistic sociolinguistic variation. What factors in the language input contribute to whether children will regularize or match the probabilistic patterns they are exposed to? Here, we test the hypothesis that low input reliability facilitates regularization. As a first step, we asked adult participants to acquire a variable plural marking pattern from a written (Exp 1) and a spoken (Exp 2) artificial language under different conditions, where they were led to believe input was more, or less, reliable. In both experiments, input reliability was manipulated through both information about the speaker (e.g., whether the speaker was likely to make mistakes) and linguistic cues (e.g., typos or pronunciation errors). Results showed that adults regularized the written language more only when they were told the speaker would make mistakes and the plural variants resembled typos (Exp 1), whereas they regularized the spoken language more when the plural variants resembled pronunciation errors regardless of the speaker’s said reliability in the spoken language. We conclude that input reliability is an important factor that can modulate learners’ regularization of probabilistic linguistic input, and that linguistic cues may play a more critical role than top-down knowledge about the speaker. The current study lays down an important foundation for future work exploring whether children are able to incorporate input reliability cues when learning probabilistic linguistic variation.more » « less
- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
-
Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1111/cogs.70006
