Fast Mapping Across Time: Memory Processes Support Children’s Retention of Learned Words

Children’s remarkable ability to map linguistic labels to referents in the world is commonly called fast mapping. The current study examined children’s (N = 216) and adults’ (N = 54) retention of fast-mapped words over time (immediately, after a 1-week delay, and after a 1-month delay). The fast mapping literature often characterizes children’s retention of words as consistently high across timescales. However, the current study demonstrates that learners forget word mappings at a rapid rate. Moreover, these patterns of forgetting parallel forgetting functions of domain-general memory processes. Memory processes are critical to children’s word learning and the role of one such process, forgetting, is discussed in detail – forgetting supports extended mapping by promoting the memory and generalization of words and categories.

• Publication year

  2012

• Venue

  Front. Psychology

• Publication date

  2012-02-27

• Fields of study

  Computer Science, Linguistics, Medicine, Psychology

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.3389/fpsyg.2012.00046PMID 22375132PMCID 3286766
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar, PubMed

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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