Abstract
Much of the current literature on selective social learning focuses on the external factors that trigger children’s selectivity. In this chapter, we review behavioral, eye-tracking, and electrophysiological evidence for how children selectively learn words—what the internal processes are that enable them to block learning when they doubt the epistemic quality of the source. We propose that young children engage a semantic-blocking mechanism that allows for the initial encoding of words but disrupts the creation of lexico-semantic representations. We offer a framework that can be extended to other selective word learning contexts to investigate whether a similar semantic-gating mechanism is engaged in different contexts. Lastly, we propose several implications for the evidence we review on the standard model of word learning.
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Mangardich, H., Sabbagh, M.A. (2018). Mechanisms of Selective Word Learning: Evidence and Implications. In: Saylor, M., Ganea, P. (eds) Active Learning from Infancy to Childhood. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-77182-3_9
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