Understanding The Connection Between Video And Reality Improves Toddler's Video Word Learning

A large number of studies on words learning have found that children learn less well from video than from equivalent live experiences.Researchers call this phenomenon as “Video Deficit.” Dual representation theory argues that children do not understand the dual nature of symbols.As a result,they often cannot connect the symbols presented in the video with real entities,which may lead to the deficit for video learning.However,it is not clear whether it can improve children's performance by guiding children to connect the objects in the video with the real objects.We aimed to investigate this question through three experiments via fast mapping paradigm.In a classic fast mapping paradigm,subjects are presented with a familiar object and a novel one and are told a novel name simultaneously.Subjects can infer that the new word refers to the unknown object and establish the novel word-referent mapping.Experiment 1 adopted the classic fast mapping paradigm to explore whether toddlers would exhibit “video deficit”,by comparing the fast mapping and naming capability of toddlers who learned novel words under real condition with that of toddlers who learned novel words under video condition.The results showed that the accuracy under video condition was lower than that under real condition,no matter for the fast mapping ability or the naming ability.The results of experiment 1 suggested that toddlers exhibited “video deficit” under fast mapping paradigm.In experiment 2,we employed adjusted fast mapping paradigm to explore whether it was possible to improve toddlers' video learning by guiding them to establish the relationship between objects in the video and real objects.The experimenter asked toddlers to play with the familiar object,which would appear asthe familiar object in the fast mapping paradigm,just before the learning trials and used language to guide them to notice that actual object was the same as the object in the video(the same condition).The toddlers in the control group held different familiar object in their hands as compared to the learning phase(the different condition).The results showed that in the video learning condition,the accuracy of the naming task under the same condition was higher than that under the different condition.It showed that guiding toddlers to connect the information between the video and the reality could improve the video word learning.However,the retention accuracy of novel words under real condition was still higher than that under video condition,which indicated that although the operation improves toddlers' video learning performance,it couldn't eliminate video deficit.The purpose of the experiment 3 was to discuss whether toddlers can notice the relationship between the object in the video and the object in the real word by exposing them to a real object that is identical to the object in the video without language cues.The results showed that the accuracy of naming task under the same condition was higher than that under the different condition,which suggested that toddlers would connect the information between the video and the reality by themselves.Through the analysis of three experiments,we found: firstly,2-5year-old toddlers' fast mapping ability are excellent,but their retention ability is still worse.Second,guiding toddlers to connect the information between the video and the reality can help them understand the dual representation of the objects in the video and improve their retention ability.