Project: Semantic learning from written contexts in children and adults

New words spend much time in a state of partial knowledge as the semantic representation is developed. At school age and onwards, children and adults learn most new words from written contexts. However, much of the research examining word learning from written contexts has focused on word learning outcomes at the behavioral level and word learning processes at the neural level. This study extends the past work by assessing processes of word learning from written contexts at the behavioral level. In two experiments, school-aged children (Experiment 1) and adults (Experiment 2) completed a Semantic Learning task followed by a Semantic Recognition task. In the Semantic Learning task, participants identified nonsense words’ meanings from sentence contexts. In the Semantic Recognition task, participants selected newly learned words’ meanings from an image array with the target meaning and three foils (semantically related, familiar, and unrelated). Analysis focused on Semantic Recognition task performance, using the errors to investigate whether semantic information is accessible for partially known words. Contrary to predictions, both adult and child participants recognized fewer than half of the newly learned words, and did not select semantically related foils more frequently than other foils. However, adults and children showed distinct selection patterns for familiar versus unrelated foils. Findings are interpreted within a framework of the contributions of multiple mechanisms on word learning.