5.1 Introduction 12

    5.2 Method 12

    5.2.1 Participants 12

    5.2.2 Stimuli and Apparatus 12

    5.2.3 Design 12

    5.2.4 Procedure 12

    5.3 Results and Discussion 13

6. General Discussion 15

7. Conclusion 17

References 18

1. Introduction

Early word learning, as the basis of language competence of children, is of much significance to language acquisition and some related cognitive development (Tardif, 2009). One central goal in the study of language acquisition of children is to better understand the processes that underlie such impressive word learning. Often described as a difficult task because of a seemingly infinite number of word-to-world mappings at just one moment in time offered by the world (Quine, 1960), word learning, therefore, is affected by various and complicated factors. Over multiple encounters in word learning, cross-situational learning mechanism has the efficiency of solving this referential ambiguity. According to theory of cross-situational word learning, learners could retain considerable receptive lexical knowledge and construct associations across multiple learning events that they have encountered (Yu & Smith, 2007). In daily contexts, there are typically a lot of words, many potential referents, and limited cues as to which the word go with which referent among the many entities in the scene. For this, an optimal learner might be expected to make use of all the available information. 

Cross-situational word learning is a process covering many aspects with contextual influence, among which co-occurrence regularity plays a remarkably significant role. As learners have the ability of retaining information across situations, the regularity underlying helps them resolve the ambiguous processes and acquire words. Even though some recent research has proved the effect of contextual persity on word interpretation, the more specific and essential one, co-occurrence frequency (or strength of association), is not further detected. Therefore, the present study tries to analyze the effect of the factors -- co-occurrence frequency, that encounter in the cross-situational learning process. 

To extend the research, here are two research questions:  

(1) Can co-occurrence regularity influence cross-situational word learning among 5- to 6-year-old children?

(2) What’s the effect of co-occurrence frequency on word learning among preschoolers?

Concerning the research questions above, the study conducts three experiments on co-occurrence regularities with three goals. The first goal is to examine that children capitalizes on the repeated co-occurrences of a word and its referent among an array of foils by formulating an associative learning process that tracks the frequencies of potential referents across all of the contexts in which the word is used. Young children have some ability of cross-situational word learning under the influence of contextual persity (Sumarga H., Suanda et al., 2014). The study tracks the paradigm of it and defines this relation as word-referent association, to offer accuracy to the following experiments. The second goal is to examine the effect of low co-occurrence frequency on word learning among preschoolers. The third goal is to examine the effect of high frequency of word-referent co-occurrence. It does not mean that the less the variety of context, the easier children acquire word-referent mappings. In cross-situational learning process, to some extent, contextual persity provides evidence for learners to find out and accumulate the association across all of these contexts. Therefore, the next two goals further comes to examine there is a difference in performance of cross-situational word learning among children under different level of co-occurrence frequencies. This study has both theoretical meanings and practical meanings for preschoolers to facilitate the ability of solving ambiguity, furthermore, to develop the ability of language acquisition.