Child Language Acquisition – Baldwin Studies and Key Concepts

Vocabulary flashcards summarizing Baldwin’s studies on children’s word learning, key experimental designs, results, and related terminology.

Auditory Paired Association (Baldwin et al., 1996)

A method where a novel word is played over a loudspeaker while a child interacts with a toy, used to test whether mere co-occurrence creates word–object links.

Main Finding of Baldwin et al. (1996)

Children did not map the heard word to the toy they were handling, showing they rely on more than simple associative learning to learn names.

Associative Learning (in word mapping)

Forming word–object links purely by repeated co-occurrence; Baldwin’s work shows this mechanism alone is insufficient for children.

Mutual Exclusivity Constraint

The bias that a new label likely refers to an object for which the listener has no existing name.

Pragmatic Reasoning in Mutual Exclusivity

Children infer a speaker’s knowledge and intent (e.g., ‘She knows I know “hammer,” so the new word must mean the unfamiliar object’), making the constraint more than a simple bias.

Under-extension

Using a familiar label for only one specific instance within its category, e.g., calling only the family dog “doggie.”

Over-extension (contrast term)

Applying a label too broadly across category boundaries (e.g., calling all four-legged animals “doggie”).

Speaker Eye-Gaze Cue (Baldwin 1993)

Children track where a speaker looks while naming, using gaze to assign the correct referent to a novel word.

Baldwin (1993) Eye-Gaze Experiment – Design

Two novel objects presented; child plays with one while experimenter labels the other (‘modi’) while visually attending to it, then asks the child to find the ‘modi.’

Outcome Predicting Communicative Intent

If the child chooses the object the experimenter looked at, it shows sensitivity to the speaker’s intention rather than personal focus.

Communicative Intent

The speaker’s purposeful attempt to refer to or convey something; children’s word learning is guided by recognizing this intent.

Word Mapping

The process of linking a spoken label to its correct referent, influenced by cues like gaze, mutual exclusivity, and pragmatic context.