Is 2-year-old children's referential disambiguation of a novel word primarily aimed at identifying the word meaning or at understanding their communicative partner?

Abstract

During everyday conversations, young children are often challenged with the task of correctly identifying the referent of novel words. What is their primary aim when they try to do so? We propose that by being motivated to successfully participate in communicative interactions, children primarily aim at comprehending what the speaker intends to mean in the specific communicative context, rather than understanding what the word conventionally means. This proposal suggests that in the absence of clear referential cues, when referential disambiguation could be guided only by two distinct factors-the novelty of possible referents or the context in which the labeling occurs-children will rather rely on the pragmatic cues of the situation than on the novelty of the objects. To investigate this hypothesis, we tested 132 two-year-old Hungarian children (67 girls and 65 boys) in a referential disambiguation paradigm. Confirming our prediction, children identified the referent by inferring the intended meaning of the speaker, and not by relying on the novelty of the objects. Thus, when pragmatic cues are provided, children primarily rely on these cues to understand the intended meaning of the speaker. We suggest that this inference to the intended meaning of the speaker might serve most of the times as the input of children's word acquisition processes. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).