Toddlers and their evaluation of words from reliable and unreliable speakers

Children monitor the source of their knowledge to decide if it is justified, incorporating evaluation even at an age when they cannot verbally report the source.

Unveiling the Role of Source Monitoring in Children’s Language Development

The second experiment tested source monitoring by having children learn new words and evaluate a speaker’s label accuracy. Children who learned from a reliable speaker were more accurate in endorsing the word mappings they learned compared to those who found the speaker unreliable. The unreliable speaker had incorrectly labeled familiar objects, which influenced the children’s ability to trust and apply the new words correctly. This demonstrated that the reliability of the source providing the information affected children’s judgments about word meanings.

To achieve this aim, Edinburgh University conducted two experiments. In two experiments, researchers tested if 30-month-old toddlers could monitor and reevaluate lexical knowledge from unreliable sources.

The previous research by Koenig & Woodward, 2010 was replicated as the first experiment in this study, where the children displayed better performance in a word learning test each time they learned words from a speaker who has previously appeared to them as reliable (correctly labeling familiar objects) as opposed to an unreliable labeler (incorrectly labeling familiar objects).

How Children Use Evaluation to Adjust Word Learning Based on Speaker Reliability

The second experiment tested source monitoring by having children learn new words and evaluate a speaker’s object labeling. Children who learned from a reliable speaker endorsed new word mappings better than those with an unreliable speaker. The unreliable speaker’s incorrect labeling of familiar objects hindered children’s trust and effective application of new word mappings.

This study concludes that young children can reevaluate recently learned word mappings upon discovering an unreliable knowledge source. Consequently, this suggests that children can assess information credibility even without verbally reporting their knowledge acquisition process.

Even without verbal skills to explain, children can monitor and understand the source of their acquired knowledge. This ability helps children determine if their knowledge is justified by assessing the reliability of the information source.