Natalie Bleijlevens 1,2, Tanya Behne 1,2 1 Developmental Psychology, University of Göttingen, Germany 2 Leibniz ScienceCampus ‘Primate Cognition’, Göttingen, Germany
How do children succeed in learning a word? Do young children, as well as adults, rely on pragmatic information to resolve referential ambiguity and identify the referents of unknown labels? Developmental research has shown robustly that if young children hear a novel label and are confronted with several potential referents, they assume the novel label refers to the novel name-unknown object rather than to any familiar name-known object. While this disambiguation effect is well documented, ongoing debates center on the underlying mechanism. Is this based on lexical constraints (e.g., the mutual exclusivity bias), guided by pragmatic reasoning, or simply driven by children’s attraction to novelty? Additionally, recent research has questioned the role of referent disambiguation for children’s word learning, suggesting that children’s in-the-moment resolution of referential ambiguity is to some extent distinguishable from their long-term learning. To explore these issues, we conducted a pre-registered online study with 2- and 3-year-olds and adults. Participants were presented with novel unnamed objects as potential referents for a novel word. Across conditions, we manipulated whether participants were provided with pragmatic information that indicated which object the speaker might refer to, or whether the only the difference between the two unnamed objects was their relative novelty to the participant. The pattern of results across several measures demonstrates the role of pragmatic information for referent disambiguation and word learning in both adults and young children. These findings highlight that, from early ontogeny on, children’s social cognitive understanding guides their communicative interactions and supports their language acquisition.
