Abstract
Children learn words in ambiguous situations, where multiple objects can potentially be referents for a new word. Yet, researchers debate whether children maintain a single word-object hypothesis - and revise it if falsified by later information - or whether children establish a network of word-object associations whose relative strengths are modulated with experience. To address this issue, we presented 4- to 12-year-old children with sets of mutual exclusivity (fast-mapping) trials: offering them with obvious initial hypotheses (that the novel object is the referent for the novel word). We observe that children aged six years and above, despite showing a novelty bias and retaining this novel word - novel object association, also formed an association between the novel word and the name-known object, thereby suggesting that older children attend to more than one word-object association, in a manner similar to associative learning. We discuss our findings in the context of competing theoretical accounts related to word learning.
Highlights
Over their first few years of life, children acquire a large vocabulary
We presented children with two sets of “classical” Mutual Exclusivity (ME) trials1; in each set, two images were presented to the child – one illustrating a novel object and the other a name-known object – while a novel label is heard
We focus on a wide age range, from 4 to 12 years of age, as this is when children acquire a major part of their vocabulary (Suanda et al, 2014, argues that “the rate of vocabulary growth during middle childhood is greater than during late infancy and toddlerhood, the period typically emphasised in word learning research” [p. 397])
Summary
Over their first few years of life, children acquire a large vocabulary. While word learning situations can take many forms, researchers have invested considerable effort uncovering learning mechanisms that children, and adults, employ in ambiguous situations. Under the HT perspective, word learners establish a single initial mapping between a word and an object This initial mapping is maintained (or confirmed) unless it is falsified by subsequent evidence – a PROPOSE-BUT-VERIFY account (Medina et al, 2011; Trueswell et al, 2013), recently supported with neuroimaging evidence (Berens et al, 2018). This account has been extended to two- and three-year-olds (Woodard, Gleitman, & Trueswell, 2016) and suggests that children, like adults, store just one hypothesised referent for each word. This approach echoes early views on Mutual Exclusivity (ME; Markman, 1990; Markman & Wachtel, 1988), that young children “fast-map” novel names to novel objects by initially rejecting additional associations to a name-known object, and that “mutual exclusivity would result from a more general principle, either a one-to-one mapping principle (Slobin, 1973) or the uniqueness principle (Pinker, 1984; Wexler & Culicover, 1980) applied to word learning” (Markman & Wachtel, 1988, p.149)
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