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We thank all the commentators for their thoughts on our review of Fast Mapping (FM) in adults, where we questioned the evidence that FM is a distinct learning mechanism, and urged caution over the excitement generated by the original report of FM in adults with amnesia using the fast mapping paradigm (FMP). While some commentators remain convinced that there is good evidence to support a FM process in adults, most reported a skepticism similar to ours. Here we respond to the main comments, and clarify some of the terms of debate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Conventional memory theory proposes that the hippocampus is initially responsible for encoding new information, before this responsibility is gradually transferred to the neocortex. Therefore, a report in 2011 by Sharon et al. of hippocampal-independent learning in humans was notable. These authors reported normal learning of new object-name associations under a Fast Mapping (FM) procedure in adults with hippocampal damage, who were amnesic according to more conventional explicit memorisation procedures. FM is an incidental learning paradigm, inspired by vocabulary acquisition in children, which is hypothesised to allow rapid, cortical-based memory formation. In the years since the original report, there has been, understandably, a growing interest in adult FM, not only because of its theoretical importance, but also because of its potential to help rehabilitate individuals with memory problems. We review the FM literature in individuals with amnesia and in healthy adults, using both explicit and implicit memory measures. Contrary to other recent reviews, we conclude that the evidence for FM in adults is weak, and restraint is needed before assuming the phenomenon exists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Successful language acquisition hinges on organizing individual words into grammatical categories and learning the relationships between them, but the method by which children accomplish this task has been debated in the literature. One proposal is that learners use the shared distributional contexts in which words appear as a cue to their underlying category structure. Indeed, recent research using artificial languages has demonstrated that learners can acquire grammatical categories from this type of distributional information. However, artificial languages are typically composed of a small number of equally frequent words, while words in natural languages vary widely in frequency, complicating the distributional information needed to determine categorization. In a series of three experiments we demonstrate that distributional learning is preserved in an artificial language composed of words that vary in frequency as they do in natural language, along a Zipfian distribution. Rather than depending on the absolute frequency of words and their contexts, the conditional probabilities that words will occur in certain contexts (given their base frequency) is a better basis for assigning words to categories; and this appears to be the type of statistic that human learners utilize. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Previous studies of word learning have presented the items to listeners under ideal conditions. Here we ask how listeners learn new vocabulary items under adverse listening conditions. Would listeners form acoustically-specific representations that incorporated the noise, base their representations on noise-free language knowledge, or both? To address these questions, listeners learned 16 words as labels for unfamiliar shapes presented on a computer display. During the learning phase, word-shape pairings were presented with either clear or white-noise-embedded tokens. For each word (e.g. dabo), another word shared consonants (e.g. dubei) and a third shared vowels (e.g. gapo). Learning was assessed in a 4AFC picture-selection task. The highest accuracy and speed were achieved by listeners who experienced the same noise level at exposure and test (both clear or both noisy), suggesting that listeners' representations of noisy words were faithful to the spectral context experienced during the learning phase. Implications for word learning and recognition across a variety of listening conditions are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

ABSTRACT. Two experiments tested the facilitative effect of dialectical oppositionality in a predication learning task. Subjects were college and high school students. Experiment 1 (N = 160) demonstrated that subjects more readily learned descriptive words that predicate a meaning in relation to a targeted item when such words were dialectical opposites than when they were not opposites (p < .00l). Experiment 2 (two samples: N = 50, N = 50) compared the heuristic benefit of various predication instructions, using consonant-verb-consonant (CVC) trigrams as learnable items. [t was found in cross-validation that dialectical oppositionality facilitated learning at an equal or higher level of efficiency than did other forms of predication such as identity, negation, and qualification (p < .001). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses various reports within the issue on topics including an overview of the different types of writing systems, how young children come to represent the correspondences between sounds and letters, and an examination of the concept of deep versus shallow orthographies.