Data and analysis for the paper:

Benitez, V., Zettersten, M., & Wojcik, E. (2020). The temporal structure of naming events differentially affects children’s and adults’ statistical word-referent learning. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 200, 104961. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jecp.2020.104961

To acquire novel words, learners often have to integrate information about word meanings across ambiguous learning events distributed in time. How does the temporal structure of those word learning events affect what learners encode? How do the effects of temporal structure differ in children and adults? In the present studies, we asked how 4- to 7-year-old children’s (N=110) and adult’s (N=90) performance on a cross-situational word learning task is influenced by the temporal distribution of learning events. We tested participants in three training conditions, manipulating the number of trials that separated naming events for specific objects. In the Unstructured condition, the temporal distribution was varied; in the Massed condition, naming events occurred with few interleaved trials; and in the Interleaved condition, naming events occurred with many interleaved trials. Adults showed substantially larger benefits from the Massed condition than children, while children were equally successful at learning in the Massed and Interleaved conditions. These results provide evidence that adults differ from children in how they exploit temporal structure during cross-situational word learning.

https://osf.io/2hmxr/

Experiment 2: https://osf.io/g2md4

Experiment 3: https://osf.io/84trw

Here is a direct link to the html rendering of the R Markdown file in the analysis folder. This provides a walkthrough of the major analyses in the paper.

https://mzettersten.github.io/crossSitRep/analysis/CrossSitRep.html

This folder contains data files and the codebook:

• CrossSitRep_allData.csv: The complete experimental dataset

• CrossSitRep_codebook.txt: A codebook for the experimental dataset

This folder contains analysis scripts:

• CrossSitRep.R: An R script documenting all analyses described in the manuscript

• CrossSitRep.Rmd: An R markdown script documenting all analyses described in the manuscript

• CrossSitRep.html: Output of the R markdown script (open in a browser)

The plots folder contains the two figures generated by the analysis script.

Feel free to contact me at zettersten@wisc.edu if you have any comments or questions about the data or the analyses.