The Role of Surprise in Spatial Language Acquisition

Surprising events that violate expectations of core knowledge about spatiotemporal properties of objects (e.g., “the rolling ball suddenly deviating from its expected path”), lead children to learn novel words better than expected events (Stahl & Feigenson, 2017). We test whether surprise facilitates the acquisition of words that refer to one object supporting another object by some mechanism (e.g. “the toy sticks to the box”). Children were given tasks: a word mapping, manual exploration, modeling and explanation. Thus far, 17 participants have been tested (Ages 3 to 6 yrs; males N = 10); children were randomly assigned to the ‘Surprise condition’ (N = 10) or the ‘Expected Condition’ (N = 7). All children first received a ‘teaching phase’ in which children viewed a novel device moving up and down as it supported a styrofoam ball. Additionally, children heard a novel verb paired with the support action. Critically, during the third teaching trial, for children in the expected condition, as the device moved up, the ball was supported by the shelf, whereas for children in the surprise condition, the ball was not supported and appeared to pass through the shelf (violating a core principle referred to as solidity). During test, we observed more accurate word learning, shelf exploration, and action demonstration for children in the surprising condition vs the expected condition. Overall, the results thus far suggest that surprise does seem to be fostering learning of a novel word that refers to support.