Discussion Questions: 25 Feb

1. Does this method show that there are no discontinuities in word learning at the time of the name explosion?
2. Have these infants acquired a word in any meaningful sense? What does one need to show word acquisition?
3. If trained the infant by coughing whenever one object was displayed and banging the table when another was presented and if infants then looked at the associated object given the associated sounds, would this be word learning?
4. What if a pigeon did it?
5. Have the infants in this experiment really learned the words "bard" and "sarl" in the same sense that an infant outside of the laboratory learns the words "cup" and "shoe"?
6. Are there any problems with experiments whose novel words are nonsensical, i.e., "wugs"?
7. How does Schafer and Plunkett measure infant's comprehension? Is this a good measure of comprehension? How else could you account for their data? How else could you measure comprehension in infants?
8. How might a preferential looking task be used to help us better understand what infants attend to in continuous speech as opposed to isolated words?
9. Does Schafer and Plunkett's study really address the "rapid word learning" that occurs in 15 month old children? What could be concluded if the same pattern of results were found with stimuli that were sets of three tones instead of CVC words? Is there any reason to believe that the children in this study are recognizing the stimuli as words that map onto the objects, and not just a general auditory pattern?
10. Shafer and Plunkett had "an intuition" that longest-look time might be an effective index of association. Was it? How could this intuition be strengthened?
11. Given the whole object constraint, what problems might Plunkett's design have considering that the wugs were shown on video monitors? Do children comprehend whole objects or are they capable of comprehending parts of objects as well?
12. Do Shafer and Plunkett's methods and results support the benefits of Markman's constraints in word learning, or are they neutral toward them?
13. Despite the fact that in Schafer and Plunkett's experiment children were proved to have learned novel words in only a few exposures and before the presupossed vocabulary spurt age of the child, are the conditions in which these children learnt the words comparable to actual quotidian conditions? Are children capable of mapping concepts onto forms at the same speed in real conditions? Why is the factor of acquiring novel words with fewer or lesser exposures relevant in children's language development?
14. Schafer and Plunkett have results indicating that 15mo infants can learn a novel word after 6 exposures. Schafer and Plunkett suggest that their data don't fit with the idea that prior to the vocabulary spurt children have trouble fast mapping between new words and referents. Are the findings really contradictory? What have the infants really learned in this task? Is it the same as what is measured in studies suggesting a vocabulary spurt?
15. Schafer and Plunkett try to avoid common methdological pitfalls in the study of children's comprehensions using preferential looking. But does their "tightly controlled" paradigm help us to understand the productive aspects of comprehension, namely how children comprehend the use of an old word for a (slighly) novel referent?