A team of psychologists from the University of Pennsylvania said that children come to the correct meaning of words in moments of insight, rather than gradually through repetition.
In their study, pre-school children and adults were asked to watch short video clips of parents interacting with their children, with the sound muted except for when the parent said a particular word, which they were asked to guess.
In the first experiment the target word was replaced by a beep. If more than half of the children and adults correctly guessed the target word, it was labelled high informative; if less than a third did, it was low informative. Seven per cent of the video clips were high informative and 90 per cent low informative.
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