“Surprisingly, the key factor that predicts whether a word will emerge from a baby’s mouth isn’t tied to how many times the baby hears that particular word. Instead, a feature called distinctiveness is what makes the difference, the researchers report September 21 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Word frequency is important on some level, says Roy. “If a child has never heard a word, he’s not going to produce it.” But distinctiveness — the contextual features that situate a word in a particular place, time or situation — was much more important than frequency for predicting whether his son would say a word, Roy says. “No matter how you cut the data, it was head and shoulders above the other factors.””
—Laura Sanders, “For kids learning new words, it’s all about context” on ScienceNews
Schools & Ecosystems 