London SE14 6NW
UK
Vocabulary acquisition is an important milestone in early cognitive development. Although children appear to guess the meaning of a new word effortlessly, questions remain about how children commit word-meaning associations to memory for later retrieval. This talk will review several empirical studies demonstrating the initial naming context plays a critical role in how well children form robust memory representations of new name-object associations. We will explore word-learning contexts in terms of both the to-be-learned targets and the other objects that may be present and competing for children’s attention. This series of studies includes both traditional referent selection (process-of-elimination) tasks as well as teaching children words from reading storybooks. Overall, it’s not just what is named that matters — but the context in which the initial naming occurs.
Biography
Jessica S. Horst earned her Ph.D. at the University of Iowa in 2007 and has since been a faculty member at the University of Sussex. Her research focuses on how young children learn names for object categories using both real (toy) objects and storybooks. The research with storybooks has been effectively applied across several community intervention programmes designed to engage young children with books.
Jessica’s interest in child language grew after she moved to Germany as a child with little knowledge of the German language. After obtaining her Abitur from a German Gymnasium, she then attended Boston University where she majored in Philosophy and Psychology with a minor in German Language and Literature. In addition to various articles on child language acquisition, she is also the author of The Psychology Research Companion: From Student Project to Working Life.