EU-Speak module 5 Vocabulary Acquisition

Week 2 Forum 4

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Most of the research on fast mapping has been carried out with children. A number of experiments were conducted with 3- to 6-year old German children acquiring English as a second language in a bilingual kindergarten project. In one of these experiments a new toy animal, a moose with a blue cap, and a word created for the study (“Swop”) for the toy were introduced in an interactive session in English which involved all the above-mentioned cues with the children. (The word “swap” is in fact an English word but usually not used in such a context, so the children could not have heard the label before.) The children saw two familiar toy animals that they could already name, an elephant and a dog. 44% (12 out of 27) of these children were later able to identify the toy after hearing the label ten times in the interactive session. However, in the same experiment involving 15 monolingual German children who heard the made-up German label “Glopp” ten times for the toy moose, the children were better than the bilingual school children: all 15 were later able to remember the label and its referent (Rohde & Tiefenthal 2000).

Why are the monolingual children more successful in their ability to remember a novel label after hearing it ten times and then after a 24 hour delay? It was speculated that fast mapping in second language acquisition may be less effective than in first language acquisition. Novel second language words may not be as salient for the children in connected speech as first language sounding words in a first language-speaking context. The second language situation may require more effort to follow utterances in the new, lesser known language. In the monolingual context in which the new label “Glopp” was used, this label stuck out as being unfamiliar. In any second language context, not only the new label but all the language used may potentially be less familiar, so that a new label is not salient and striking enough for the learners (ibid.).

Eight follow-up experiments were conducted over a period lasting two years in order to investigate the influence of various factors on the success of fast mapping, such as word class (most of the available first language studies were concerned with nouns), the medium of introduction (a game, a song, a video film), the temporal delay between introduction and test, the amount of new words introduced, the frequency of labelling a new object, sex, age and the size of children's vocabularies in the lexical field relevant to the new word. All the experiments were also conducted with the monolingual German children.

The most important results were:

  • Word class is an influential factor: In general, nouns were better learned than verbs, and verbs, in turn, were more successfully learned than adjectives. This seems to support the view of the primacy of nouns (GentnerBoroditsky 2001).
  • The ability of fast mapping is not affected by different word introduction contexts. Even if the children in an experiment are not given the opportunity to negotiate meaning, i.e., ask questions about the meaning of new words (as in one video experiment), they are able to infer the target-like meaning and learn it.
  • The attention level and concentration involved in a particular task are important. When a play context was too exciting, the children did not remember any new vocabulary.
  • Children received better scores when novel labels were introduced to them individually rather than in a group situation.
  • Not surprisingly, the frequency with which a new label is introduced plays a role in fast mapping.
  • Comprehension is by far more successful than production. New words may be understood after a delay of 24 hours, but very few of the children were able to produce the labels.
  • It is insignificant whether children were tested after a one-day or a one-week delay after the introduction of a novel label. Their performance was relatively stable.
  • The monolingual German children performed better than the L2 English children in every task. Due to the fact that English is not the ambient language and German is by far dominant in the bilingual kindergarten, fast mapping is consistently more successful in a German context as new words in German tend to be more salient than in English where the attention required to understand instructions, for example, may be considerably higher.