Attentional Highlighting as a Mechanism behind Early Word Learning

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. Twoand 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.