Children know what words other children know

Abstract

To communicate successfully, we need to use words that our conversational partner understands. Adults maintain precise models of the words people are likely to know, using both prior experience with their conversational partner and general metalinguistic information. Do children also know what words others are likely to know? We asked children ages 4-8 (n = 62) to predict whether a very young child would know each of 15 familiar animal words. With minimal information, even children as young as 4 made reliable predictions about the target child's vocabulary knowledge. Children were more likely to judge that a younger child would know an early-acquired word (e.g., dog) than a late-acquired word (e.g., lobster), and this pattern became more robust over development. Thus, even preschool age children are adept at inferring other children's vocabulary knowledge, and they could leverage this information to communicate effectively.