{"pk":26429,"title":"Active Overhearing:Development in Preschoolers’ Skill at ‘Listening in’ to Naturalistic Overheard Speech","subtitle":null,"abstract":"Overhearing can be seen as active learning, and overheardspeech provides an increasingly viable source of linguisticinput across development. This study extends previous re-sults showing learning from overhearing simplified, pedagogicspeech to a more ecologically valid context. Children learnmultiple words and facts corresponding to novel toys eitherthrough an overheard phone call or through direct instruction.Remarkably, 4.5–6-year-olds learned four new words equallywell in both conditions. Their performance on a set of six factswas even better, especially when taught directly. Analysis ofthe videos revealed that older children with high test accuracyboth looked toward the experimenter often, and tracked ob-jects as she discussed them. 3–4.5-year-olds only learned factsfrom overhearing, and exhibited greater varability in attention.These results suggest learning from overhearing is driven byattention to the indirect input, and may be a skill that under-goes substantial development during the preschool years.","language":"eng","license":{"name":"","short_name":"","text":null,"url":""},"keywords":[{"word":"active learning; lexical development; overhearing"}],"section":"Papers","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/2s21g88s","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Ruthe","middle_name":"","last_name":"Foushee","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of California, Berkeley","department":""},{"first_name":"Fei","middle_name":"","last_name":"Xu","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of California, Berkeley","department":""}],"date_submitted":null,"date_accepted":null,"date_published":"2016-01-01T18:00:00Z","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/26429/galley/16065/download/"}]}