LEARNING EMERGENT RELATIONS BY EXCLUSION IN 2 TO 3 YEARS-OLD CHILDREN

Abstract

Responding by exclusion is a robust phenomenon in vocabulary learning. However, there is not enough evidence of children under 36 months of age learning emerging relationships by exclusion. This study sought to verify whether name-object relations could be learned after a single exclusion trial and after repeated exposure to similar exclusion trials. In a day-care center for children and toddlers, we requested eight participants, aged from 27 to 36 months, to select objects conditionally to spoken words in an auditory-visual matching-to-sample task. The general procedure involved teaching baseline auditory-visual relations (BL); exclusion, learning, and control probes; a naming test and a verbal repertoire assessment. When participants did not meet the BL learning criterion, an additional teaching procedure was conducted, which involved progressively increasing the number of comparison stimuli and decreasing the number of trials. If the learning probes criterion was not met, participants were re-exposed to the general procedure. Throughout the experiment, each participant was re-exposed to the general procedure and four children were re-exposed to the additional BL teaching procedure. Three out of eight participants learned the object-name relations and performance was high on the control probes. The largest number of exposures to trials similar to exclusion trials increased the likelihood of learning the name-object relationship. Keywords: responding by exclusion, learning outcome probes, conditional discriminations, listening repertoire, young children.