LAUSR

Word learning studies traditionally examine the narrow link between words and objects, indifferent to the rich contextual information surrounding objects. This research examined whether children attend to this contextual information and construct an associative matrix of the words, objects, people, and environmental context during word learning. In Experiment 1, preschool-aged children (age: 3;2-5;11 years) were presented with novel words and objects in an animated storybook. Results revealed that children constructed associations beyond words and objects. Specifically, children attended to and had the strongest associations for features of the environmental context but failed to learn word-object associations. Experiment 2 demonstrated that children (age: 3;0-5;8 years) leveraged strong associations for the person and environmental context to support word-object mapping. This work demonstrates that children are especially sensitive to the word learning context and use associative matrices to support word mapping. Indeed, this research suggests associative matrices of the environment may be foundational for children's vocabulary development. We examined children's attention to and memory for the associations between words, objects, people, and broader environmental context encountered during a word learning episode. Experiment 1 revealed that children had the strongest associations for features of the word learning context (i.e., person and scene context). Experiment 2 revealed that children could leverage stronger associations for the person and scene context to map words and objects. Children construct contextually-grounded associative matrices to support word mapping and thus researchers should shift to focusing on contextual information when developing word learning theories. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.