How Children Learn the Meanings of Words by Paul Bloom. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2000, xii+300 pp. Reviewed by Masahiko Minami San Francisco State University How do children learn the meanings of words? In his new book, Paul Bloom examines a variety of issues associated with children's word learning, a process intricately connected with other aspects of language acquisition. Bloom claims that children learn words via cognitive abilities that already exist for other pur- poses, such as the ability to infer others' intentions, the ability to acquire concepts, and an appreciation of syntactic In structure. Bloom's book provides a series of el- egant and convincing arguments concerning how children learn words. briefly Chapter First Words, Bloom lays out the plan for the book and describes issues surrounding the overall topic. In Chapter 2 the author explores fast mapping, in which children make a quick guess about a word's denotation on the basis of limited experience. Chapter 3, Theory of Mind, deals with a wide range of topics, including the listener's ability to determine the references made by his or her interlocutor's choice of words; here also, Bloom investigates children's appreciation of the mental states of others, through which children acquire lexical items (and syntax as well) by means of associative acquire are nouns, learning. Because the majority of words that children initially Bloom gives special treatment to nouns and pronouns: Common nouns are discussed in Chapter 4, and pronouns and proper names are dealt with in Chapter 5. In Chapter 6, Concepts and Categories, Bloom extends his analysis to the conceptual foundations of word learning. In Chapter Naming Representations, he discusses a case study important to any theory of concepts and naming visual representations. From here, Bloom moves to other parts of speech: In Chapter 8, Learning Words through Linguistic Context, he offers an account of how chil- dren learn verbs and adjectives, as the development of syntactic abilities cannot be dissociated from the development of lexical abilities. Chapter 9 deals with learn the how we numbers and Chapter 10 with how the words we learn affect our mental life. In Chapter 11, Final Words, Bloom provides a brief summary and some general remarks. Throughout the book, the author weaves in ideas pro- posed by such linguists, psychologists, and philosophers as B. F. Skinner, Noam Chomsky, and Jean Piaget, who, through different lenses, have closely observed words for and analyzed how human beings develop and around them. issue long relevant to how they conceptualize the world As with most language acquisition texts, Bloom makes early reference to an human development: the nature/nurture debate. These alter- ISSN 1050-4273 Vol. 12 Issues in Applied Linguistics © 2001, Regents of the University of California No.

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How Children Learn the Meanings of Words

After feedback, peopleas recollections of judgments they made earlier differ systematically from their actual original judgments: Their recollection judgments are typically closer to the truth than the original judgments have been. It has been proposed that this phenomenon¨the so-called hindsight bias¨may be due to cognitive reconstruction of the prior judgment. We propose a theoretical model of this reconstruction process. The modelas crucial assumptions are that knowledge is updated after feedback, and that reconstruction is based on the updated knowledge. By using a simple inferential heuristic (Take The Best, Gigerenzer & Goldstein, 1996), this model explains at the level of individual judgments why hindsight bias does or does not occur, and even why it sometimes reverses. Two studies show (a) that knowledge after feedback is indeed systematically shifted toward feedback, (b) that our model accounts for 75 percent of cases in which either hindsight bias or reversed hindsight bias occurred, and (c) that assisting knowledge recall reduces hindsight bias. We conclude that hindsight bias can be seen as a by-product of an adaptive process, namely the updating of knowledge after feedback.

Hindsight Bias: A By-product of Knowledge Updating

Agency: Its role in mental development

The cost of caring.

CONTEXT: Young children have increasing access to interactive applications (apps) at home and at school. Existing research is clear on the potential dangers of overuse of screens, but there is less clarity around the extent to which interactive apps may be helpful in supporting early learning. OBJECTIVE: In this systematic review, we present a narrative synthesis of studies examining whether children DATA SOURCES: The PsycInfo, PubMed, ACM Digital Library, and ERIC databases were searched. STUDY SELECTION: Studies were included if the study design was randomized or nonrandomized controlled (quasi-experimental), the sample mean age was DATA EXTRACTION: Of 1447 studies, 35 were included. RESULTS: Evidence of a learning benefit of interactive app use for early academic skills was found across multiple studies, particularly for early mathematics learning in typically developing children. Researchers did not find evidence of an intervention effect for apps aiming to improve social communication skills in children with autism spectrum disorder. LIMITATIONS: Risk of bias was unclear for many studies because of inadequate reporting. Studies were highly heterogenous in interventions, outcomes, and study design, making comparisons of results across studies difficult. CONCLUSIONS: There is emerging evidence to suggest that interactive apps may be useful and accessible tools for supporting early academic development. More research is needed to evaluate both the potential of educational apps to support early learning, and their limitations.

https://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/pediatrics/early/2019/12/19/peds.2019-1579.full.pdf

Apps As Learning Tools: A Systematic Review

Today’s children have more opportunities than ever before to learn from interactive technology, yet experimental research assessing the efficacy of children’s learning from interactive media in comparison to traditional learning approaches is still quite scarce. Moreover, little work has examined the efficacy of using touch-screen devices for research purposes. The current study compared children’s rate of learning factual information about animals during a face-to-face instruction from an adult female researcher versus an analogous instruction from an interactive device. Eighty-six children ages 4 through 8 years (64% male) completed the learning task in either the Face-to-Face condition (n = 43) or the Interactive Media condition (n = 43). In the Learning Phase of the experiment, which was presented as a game, children were taught novel facts about animals without being told that their memory of the facts would be tested. The facts were taught to the children either by an adult female researcher (Face-to-Face condition) or from a pre-recorded female voice represented by a cartoon Llama (Interactive Media condition). In the Testing Phase of the experiment that immediately followed, children’s memory for the taught facts was tested using a 4-option forced-choice paradigm. Children’s rate of learning was significantly above chance in both conditions and a comparison of the rates of learning across the two conditions revealed no significant differences. Learning significantly improved from age 4 to age 8, however, even the preschool-aged children performed significantly above chance, and their performance did not differ between conditions. These results suggest that, interactive media can be equally as effective as one-on-one instruction, at least under certain conditions. Moreover, these results offer support for the validity of using interactive technology to collect data for research purposes. We discuss the implications of these results for children’s learning from interactive media, parental attitudes about interactive technology, and research methods.

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Children Can Learn New Facts Equally Well From Interactive Media Versus Face to Face Instruction

Perspective taking, or "theory of mind," involves reasoning about the mental states of others (e.g., their intentions, desires, knowledge, beliefs) and is called upon in virtually every aspect of human interaction. Our goals in writing this chapter were to provide an overview of (a) the research questions developmental psychologists ask to shed light on how children think about the inner workings of the mind, and (b) why such research is invaluable in understanding human nature and our ability to interact with, and learn from, one another. We begin with a brief review of early research in this field that culminated in the so-called litmus test for a theory of mind (i.e., false-belief tasks). Next, we describe research with infants and young children that created a puzzle for many researchers, and briefly mention an intriguing approach researchers have used to attempt to "solve" this puzzle. We then turn to research examining children's understanding of a much broader range of mental states (beyond false beliefs). We briefly discuss the value of studying individual differences by highlighting their important implications for social well-being and ways to improve perspective taking. Next, we review work illustrating the value of capitalizing on children's proclivity for selective social learning to reveal their understanding of others' mental states. We close by highlighting one line of research that we believe will be an especially fruitful avenue for future research and serves to emphasize the complex interplay between our perspective-taking abilities and other cognitive processes.

Perspectives on Perspective Taking: How Children Think About the Minds of Others

A 'curse of knowledge' in the absence of knowledge? People misattribute fluency when judging how common knowledge is among their peers.

The ability to make inferences about what one's peers know is critical for social interaction and communication. Three experiments (n = 309) examined the curse of knowledge, the tendency to be biased by one's knowledge when reasoning about others' knowledge, in children's estimates of their peers' knowledge. Four‐ to 7‐year‐olds were taught the answers to factual questions and estimated how many peers would know the answers. When children learned familiar answers, they showed a curse of knowledge in their peer estimates. But, when children learned unfamiliar answers to the same questions, they did not show a curse of knowledge. These data shed light on the mechanisms underlying perspective taking, supporting a fluency misattribution account of the curse of knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Taeh Haddock

Papers

Children Can Learn New Facts Equally Well From Interactive Media Versus Face to Face Instruction

Perspectives on Perspective Taking: How Children Think About the Minds of Others

A 'curse of knowledge' in the absence of knowledge? People misattribute fluency when judging how common knowledge is among their peers.

Only Familiar Information is a "Curse": Children's Ability to Predict What Their Peers Know.

Fluency misattribution and the curse of knowledge bias in children