Resolving Referential Ambiguity for Nouns and Verbs Across Situations by Foreign Language Learners

The study examined the process used by foreign language learners in resolving referential ambiguity across situations. Two hundred learners of English as a foreign language took two cross-situational word learning tasks, one on nouns and the other on verbs. In each trial, participants heard a novel word, observed two referents (animals or dynamic events), and selected one referent under uncertainty. Following zero or two intervening trials, they were tested by one of three probes, which preserved the word-referent mapping previously selected, switched the referent previously selected, or switched the form previously heard. Learners performed above chance on all the probes, indicating that they tracked the unselected but potential word-referent mappings across situations for later learning. The performance pattern was similar for nouns and verbs, though verb learning was slightly impaired when the referent was switched over intervening trials. Moreover, verb learning was associated with phonological short-term memory, but not with statistical learning and English vocabulary. Noun learning was associated with none of the learner variables. These results suggest that foreign language learners track all the word-referent co-occurrences across situations in resolving referential ambiguity, though success of tracking can be constrained by the complexity of the co-occurrences and individual learners’ memory capacities.