Mechanisms for Evaluating Others’ Reliability When Learning Novel Words

Abstract

Word learning is a social act. Because there is an arbitrary relation between words and their meaning, children must learn words from other people. Other people, however, are not always reliable sources of knowledge. People can be ignorant, hold false beliefs, or simply be deceptive. How do children evaluate the reliability of sources of knowledge for word learning? This chapter investigates the possibility that children possess multiple mechanisms for evaluating such reliability and possess such mechanisms very early in development. We suggest that infants not only track the accuracy of others using statistical learning mechanisms but also incorporate their existing knowledge of the world into judgments of reliability to make judicious inferences about the knowledge of a speaker and the pragmatics of a communicative act. Moreover, we suggest that as children get older, both low-level associative mechanisms and higher-level cognitive processes influence the way in which children track and use others’ reliability as sources of knowledge.