Learning by Exclusion in Toddlers

Abstract

Children of different ages respond by exclusion in trials of auditory-visual conditional discriminations. However, the learning of these relations can depend on a variety of factors, such as age, vocabulary size and amount of exposure to the emerging relation. The present study assessed learning by exclusion in children aged between 16 and 24 months, using learning probes with and without mask that required either selection or rejection topographies. Familiar word-object conditional discriminations were taught to compose the baseline. Exclusion, learning, and control probes were used to test emergence, learning, and control by novelty in name-referent relations. Participants responded by exclusion but did not demonstrate consistent learning across all probes. Best performance occurred in learning probes that required control by selection. In the rejection probes, the participants consistently selected the novel stimulus. These results suggest that the type of probe used influences observed performance.