Exploring The Influence of Caregivers’ Object Category Selection on Children’s Word Learning

Abstract

Caregivers scaffold their children’s word learning in many ways, including by adjusting their behavior to engage their children’s attention and fine-tuning their speech to meet their children’s current knowledge levels. How exactly caregivers make decisions about what type of words they want their children to learn is less clear. The current study examines how caregivers select object categories for their children to learn and whether their choices help their children learn new words. To test this question, English-learning two-year-olds learned words from four different categories (i.e., animals, vehicles, toys, food) in an eye-tracking study. In one condition, caregivers selected the categories for each word their children heard, while in the other condition, these words were instead randomly selected. We found that children did not learn more effectively when their caregivers chose the order and frequency of object categories. Caregivers primarily reasoned that their decisions were based on their children’s interests, despite mostly choosing a diverse approach (e.g., one of each category). Additionally, we found that children’s reaction time was significantly quicker for categories of higher interest and that children with a larger vocabulary size and a larger pre-existing knowledge of words in the target category were slightly more accurate in word learning. Our findings suggest that, in pedagogical settings where the goal is for their children to learn new words, caregivers predominantly motivate their choices based on their perception of their children’s interests but choose to expose their children to a diverse selection of words. Overall, our study provides an introductory exploration of the process of caregivers’ decision-making about their children’s word learning.