Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Limited work has considered how the temporal distribution of labeling events affects word learning in ambiguous contexts, such as the cross-situational word learning paradigm, over real-world timescales. The temporal distribution of learning events can impact how well information is retained: spacing out information promotes retention more than presenting information in close succession. In the current study, adults were presented with novel object-word pairings across six different temporal schedules over four consecutive training days. Word learning was assessed either immediately after the final training session (N = 50) or after a week (N = 54). Results revealed that adults successfully disambiguated word-object mappings across all learning schedules at both test times, except for the massed and most spaced schedules at the 1-week delay. These findings suggest that temporal distribution effects emerge across extended timescales, but there might be constraints on the amount of spacing that is optimal for word learning.