As children learn words, they develop attentional biases that support word learning but are hard to overcome. Predictive contextual cues may help increase attention to non-biased, or overlooked, features. This study sought to direct 3-year-old children’s attention to texture, a feature typically overlooked when categorizing new words early in development. During training, half of the children learned novel shape (a biased feature) and texture (an overlooked feature) categories with predictive cues, and half of the children learned the same categories with non-predictive cues. Children were then tested in a categorization task with novel texture words. The cues were present at test in Experiment 1 (N = 63) and absent in Experiment 2 (N = 37). Children in the predictive cue condition consistently chose the texture match more often than children in the non-predictive cue condition. These results inform our understanding of the cognitive mechanisms that may contribute to word learning.

当孩子学习单词时，他们会发展注意力偏见，以支持单词学习，但很难克服。预测性上下文线索可能有助于增加对非偏见或被忽略特征的关注。这项研究旨在引导3岁儿童注意纹理，这是在早期对新单词进行分类时通常会忽略的功能。在训练过程中，一半的孩子通过预测性线索学习了新颖的形状（有偏差的特征）和质地（被忽略的特征）类别，一半的孩子通过非预测性的线索学习了相同的类别。然后在分类任务中使用新颖的纹理单词对孩子进行测试。提示出现在实验1的测试中（N  = 63），而没有出现在实验2的N中（N = 63） = 37）。处于预示性提示条件下的儿童​​比处于非预示性提示条件下的儿童​​更经常选择纹理匹配。这些结果有助于我们理解可能有助于单词学习的认知机制。