Learning is often accompanied by a subjective sense of confidence in one’s knowledge, a feeling of knowing what you know and how well you know it. Subjective confidence has been shown to guide learning in other domains, but has received little attention so far in the word learning literature. Across three word learning experiments, we investigated whether and how a sense of confidence in having acquired a word meaning influences the word learning process itself. First, we show evidence for a confirmation bias during word learning in a cross-situational statistical learning task: Learners who are highly confident they know the meaning of a word are more likely to persist in their belief than learners who are not, even after observing objective evidence disconfirming their belief. Second, we show that subjective confidence in a word meaning modulates inferential processes based on that word, affecting learning over the whole lexicon: Learners who hold high confidence in a word meaning are more likely to use that word to make mutual exclusivity inferences about the meaning of other words. We conclude that confidence influences word learning by modulating both information selection processes and inferential processes and discuss the implications of these results for word learning models.

学习往往伴随着对自己知识的主观自信感，一种知道自己知道什么以及知道的程度的感觉。主观信心已被证明可以指导其他领域的学习，但迄今为止在单词学习文献中很少受到关注。在三个单词学习实验中，我们调查了获得单词含义的信心是否以及如何影响单词学习过程本身。首先，我们展示了跨情境统计学习任务中单词学习过程中确认偏差的证据：高度自信的学习者比不知道单词含义的学习者更有可能坚持自己的信念，即使在观察之后客观证据否定了他们的信念。第二，我们表明，对词义的主观信心会调节基于该词的推理过程，从而影响对整个词典的学习：对词义高度自信的学习者更有可能使用该词对其他词的含义进行互斥性推理字。我们得出结论，信心通过调节信息选择过程和推理过程来影响单词学习，并讨论这些结果对单词学习模型的影响。