So what does this mean for young infants and their eager parents who want to help them learn a language? “It’s a study about the mechanism,” she explained. Learners appear to use a one-trial ‘fast-mapping’ procedure, even under conditions of referential uncertainty.” The researchers conclude in their study abstract: “These findings challenge current models of cross-situational learning which assert that multiple meaning hypotheses are stored and cross-tabulated via statistical procedures. Being able to forget is what would save them form an incorrect interpretation.” It is hours and days between when they hear a word.
Infants are in this situation all the time. “The delay allowed people to forget their incorrect hypothesis and start new.
In the third experiment, the learners saw some video vignettes one day, then came back up to three days later and were shown the same video. “What we think this shows is they did not remember alternative meanings for the word other than what they guessed.” In this experiment what the researchers found was that when people guessed incorrectly at the very beginning, then they continued to guess incorrectly, explained Medina. But this time they saw five videos for each word they were trying to learn, but rather than sequentially the videos were mixed up with other videos. In the second experiment – which is designed to see if learners build up an interpretation of words across context – people watched the videos again, Medina said. Only a small percentage of videos – 7 per cent – triggered a correct response and understanding where almost half of the subjects were able to correctly guess the word. In 90 per cent of the videos, less than a third of the subjects guessed the word, said Medina. And it appears not as easy as many researchers had thought. The purpose of the first experiment was to see how easy it was to guess a word’s meaning just by looking at what you see before you, said Medina. In the second and third videos, instead of the target or new word subjects heard a nonsense word. In the first video, the subjects heard only a beep when the target or new word was mentioned.
Aha moment meaning series#
In the three experiments, adults watched a series of 48 silent 40-second clips of parents interacting with their children.
They learn in a moment of insight – a eureka moment or an epiphany rather than building up to a meaning over a series of situations and context.” “Rather they come up with a single interpretation in that moment. “Learners do not track multiple possible meanings for each encounter with a novel word,” she said. But the research proves something else is at play. The group – made up of 37 subjects – watched three different videos involving a new word.Ĭurrent learning theories maintain that a child learns his or her first word by being aware of associations and various contexts in which they become exposed to them over time, explained Medina, a post-doctoral fellow in psychology at the Institute for Research in Cognitive Science at the University of Pennsylvania. Tamara Nicol Medina and three other researchers studied a group of adults in three experiment designed to approximate babies or those learning a new language. Babies and those studying a new language learn words in moments of insight – or, as now former talk show host Oprah Winfrey calls them, “aha” moments – according to new research in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
0 kommentar(er)
