The spatial context of everyday speech to children is remarkably consistent. Words tend to repeatedly occur in the same locations, and these words are learned earlier than those which are more scattered in use. Yet little is known about how spatial contextualization influences this process. Does more constrained spatial context itself lead to better word learning? Or does it simply correlate with other informative cues in the input? Here, we assess how word learning is influenced by different levels of spatial contextualization in naturalistic scenes. We use different teaching methods (other-directed versus self-guided) as a proxy for distinguishing how the need for inductive inference mediates reliance on spatial context. We found that greater spatial contextualization led to better word learning, but only when inductive inference was needed. Fixation patterns during familiarization further showed that learners paid more attention to objects with more contextualized labels when learning was self-guided. Overall, these findings suggest that learners can leverage spatial context to support word learning in the absence of rich linguistic input.

Authors:

Sophie Domanski: University of Maryland; Yi Ting Huang: University of Maryland