Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Overhearing can be seen as active learning, and overheardspeech provides an increasingly viable source of linguisticinput across development. This study extends previous re-sults showing learning from overhearing simplified, pedagogicspeech to a more ecologically valid context. Children learnmultiple words and facts corresponding to novel toys eitherthrough an overheard phone call or through direct instruction.Remarkably, 4.5–6-year-olds learned four new words equallywell in both conditions. Their performance on a set of six factswas even better, especially when taught directly. Analysis ofthe videos revealed that older children with high test accuracyboth looked toward the experimenter often, and tracked ob-jects as she discussed them. 3–4.5-year-olds only learned factsfrom overhearing, and exhibited greater varability in attention.These results suggest learning from overhearing is driven byattention to the indirect input, and may be a skill that under-goes substantial development during the preschool years.