Temperament Moderates Novel Word Learning at 15 Months

作者：Wallace E. Dixon, Allison Lowe, Betsy Caldwell, Hannah G. Lawman, Andrea D. Clements · 发表于：Digital Commons - East Tennessee State University (East Tennessee State University) · 年份：2008 · 研究领域：Reading and Literacy Development、Educational and Psychological Assessments

Researchers have been reporting temperament-language correlations in infants for 10 years. However, in order to identify directions of effects between temperament and language, methodologies besides correlations need to be developed. The “competition attention paradigm” is an effort to sidestep some of the direction-of-effect issues by asking infants to learn novel words in the context of environmental distractions designed to tap into children’s temperaments. The purpose of the present study was to explore whether environmental distracters would differentially impact 15-month-olds’ novel wordlearning as a function of children’s temperamental profiles. Twenty-eight 15-month-olds were asked to learn 4 novel words. Novel word learning consisted of initially familiarizing children with two novel objects, and then mapping a novel label to only one of the novel objects five times. Novel word comprehension was tested by asking children to select the newly-labeled object from the pair of novel objects across 4 test trials. A remotely-controlled mechanical spider competed for children’s attention during object familiarization on two of the words. Half the children were distracted on the first two words, half were distracted on the last two. Temperament was assessed via parental reporting using the Early Child Behavior Questionnaire. The environmental distractions did not impact children’s word-learning directly. However, order of distraction presentation did [F(1, 23) = 7.16, p = .01...