Whose DAM account? Attentional learning explains Booth and Waxman.

Full Abstract

Booth and Waxman (Cognition 84 (2002) B11) have recently shown that linguistic cues to animacy affect children's novel name extensions. They argue that this demonstration contradicts two central tenets of our attentional learning account of object naming, which Booth and Waxman characterize as the "dumb attentional mechanism" or "DAM" account. In the present article, we show that the first of these tenets has never been a feature of the attentional learning account, and that the second tenet, which is central to our account, is not addressed by Booth and Waxman's findings. We suggest that the debate about the nature of children's language and cognition would profit from an increased awareness of the different levels of analysis at which different researchers are working.

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Author information

Author/s: Smith, Linda B (LB); Jones, Susan S (SS); Yoshida, Hanako (H); Colunga, Eliana (E);

Affiliation: Department of Psychology, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN, USA. smith4@indiana.edu

Journal and publication information

Publication Type: Comment; Journal Article

Journal: Cognition (Cognition), published in Netherlands. (Language: eng)

Reference: 2003-Apr; vol 87 (issue 3) : pp 209-13

Dates: Created 2003/04/09; Completed 2003/08/28; Revised 2004/11/17;

PMID: 12684200, status: MEDLINE (last retrieval date: 11/6/2008)

Sourced from the National Library of Medicine. Abstract text and other information may be subject to copyright.

Comments and Corrections

CommentOn: Cognition. 2002 May;84(1):B11-22. (PMID: 12062150)

CommentIn: Cognition. 2003 Apr;87(3):215-8. (PMID: 12684201)

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