Fast Mapping

Fast mapping is the hypothesized mental process by which a new concept is learned, or a new hypothesis about a concept formed, based on only minimal exposure to information about it. Researchers regard fast mapping as especially significant during language acquisition in young children, where it may help explain their rapid growth in vocabulary; children as young as two years old can successfully use the process through what researchers call referent selection and referent retention, even when their exposure to a new word is brief and surrounded by distractions. Research by Susan Carey and Elsa Bartlett in 1978, who formally named and articulated the process, and later work by Lori Markson and Paul Bloom in 1997, found that children retain newly learned words for substantial periods of time after only a single exposure, an ability that appears specific to learning novel words rather than to retaining other kinds of information, which suggests fast mapping operates as a word-learning mechanism of its own.