When children are about
3-years-old, one of the big things they need to do is to learn about the huge
variety of objects in the world around them.
Not only does this learning help them to make sense of the world, but is
crucial for children to learn the labels we use for different objects so that
they can talk about those objects again in the future.
Indeed, starting when children
are about a year-and-a-half old, they start learning lots of labels for new
objects. That pattern continues for a
few years after that.
A fascinating paper by Amy Booth
in the January 2015 issue of Cognitive Development explored the
role of causal information in learning words for new objects. Causal information is knowledge about the way
the world works.
Previous research suggests that
when children find out something about the way an object works, they learn
about the object faster than when they learn about some other property about it
like what it looks like. The materials
used in this study are shown in the picture attached to this blog entry. This picture is Figure 1 from the
article.
The novel objects were described
with a label that the children would not have heard before (like Kulloo or
Gippit). The causal information focused
on the function of the object. For
example, the Gippit was described as being used to make circles on walls. The non-causal information (which Booth
called “causally weak” to be careful not to assume that children would not make
any guesses about causal information) was that Gippits always have circles
painted on the bottom.
Children were shown each object
and were told the causal or noncausal fact about it. They were then told the label. On each block of the study, children
practiced the label several times. They
continued learning until they could correctly remember which label went with
each object. They were tested by hearing
the label and pointing to the object it went with.
The causal information made the label
easier to learn. Children learned to
identify the label that went with the object in fewer trials when it was
associated with information about the function of the object than when it was
associated with a hidden feature of the object.
By the end of this part of the
study, though, the children had learned the labels equally well regardless of
which information they heard. It just
took them longer to learn it when they got feature information than when they got
causal information.
The key question, though, is why
the causal information helps. One
possibility is that causal information is particularly interesting to
3-year-olds, and so it causes them to pay more attention to the object and the
label, and so they learn the label faster.
A second possibility is that the causal information provides a deep set
of connections to existing knowledge and so children actually remember the
labels better when they were connected to causal information than when they
were connected to features.
To test this possibility the
children were brought back to the lab 2 to 3 weeks after the first
session. They were tested on the labels
again.
If the causal information just
causes children to pay more attention to the object and the label, then two
weeks later, children should be equally good at remembering which label went
with each object regardless of the other information they heard about the
object, because they had learned the labels equally well by the end of the
first part of the study.
However, if the causal information
is enriching the connection between the object and the child’s other knowledge,
then children should remember labels associated with causal features better
than those associated with non-causal features.
In fact, the children remembered
the labels equally well regardless of the kind of information they learned when
they encountered the object for the first time.
This research suggests that children find causal knowledge interesting,
and when they hear about functions of objects, they pay more attention than if
they just hear about other features. Once
they learn the label for an object, though, they remember it later, even if
they hadn’t learned about the function of the object.
This finding suggest that it is
valuable to teach children about functions at the same time that we teach them
about the names for objects. This causal
information helps children to understand a little more about the way the world
works. It also makes it easier for kids
to learn the labels for objects, which makes it easier for the children to talk
about those objects later.
