The Influence of Co-occurrence Probability on Knowledge Generalization in Preschool-Age Children

Prior research had documented that semantically-similar labels that co-occur in child-directed speech promote generalization in young children. The present study examined whether co-occurrence probability – in the absence of semantic similarity – can influence children’s inferences. Fourand five-year-old children were exposed to an auditory speech stream consisting of trisyllabic nonsense words (e.g. “golabu”) that were concatenated into a continuous speech stream. After listening to the stream, children were given a label extension task where the first two syllables of a nonsense word were assigned to a novel target object (e.g. “gola”); children were asked to choose which of the three test items should be referred to by the remaining syllable of this nonsense word (e.g., “bu”; Experimental condition) or by a syllable from a different nonsense word (e.g., “ti”; Control condition). Children’s generalization performance in this task was similar to results of previous research that used natural rather than artificial language stimuli. These results are consistent with the notion that that low-level, automatic processes can influence performance on high-level reasoning tasks.