Fast Mapping

In cognitive psychology, fast mapping is a hypothesized mental process whereby a new concept can be learned (or a new hypothesis formed) based only on a single exposure to a given unit of information. Fast mapping is thought by some researchers to be particularly important during language acquisition in young children, and may serve (at least in part) to explain the prodigious rate at which children gain vocabulary. The process was first formally articulated, and the term 'fast mapping' coined, by Harvard researchers Susan Carey and Elsa Bartlett in 1978.

Today, there is ample evidence to suggest that children do not learn words through ‘fast mapping’ but rather learn probabilistic, predictive relationships between objects and sounds that develop over time. Evidence for this comes, for example, from children’s struggles to understand color words: although infants can distinguish between basic color categories, many sighted children use color words in the same way that blind children do up until the fourth year. Typically, words such as “blue” and “yellow” appear in their vocabularies and they produce them in appropriate places in speech, but their application of individual color terms is haphazard and interchangeable. If shown a blue cup and asked its color, typical three-year olds seem as likely to answer “red” as “blue.” These difficulties persist up until around age four, even after hundreds of explicit training trials. Children’s behavior clearly indicates that they have knowledge of these words, but this knowledge is far from complete; rather it appears to be predictive, as opposed to all-or-none.