In conversation, speech is almost always ambiguous, with this ambiguity resolved by context and discourse history ("common ground"). One important cue for disambiguation is the topic under discussion with a particular partner (e.g., "want to pick?" means something different in a conversation with a bluegrass musician vs. with a book club partner). Here, we investigated 2-to 5-year-old American English-speaking children's (N = 131) reliance on conversational topics with specific partners to interpret ambiguous or novel words. Children heard a speaker consistently refer to objects from a category without mentioning the category itself. In Study 1, 3-and 4-year-olds interpreted the ambiguous pronoun it as referring to another member of the same category. In study 2, 4-year-olds only interpreted the pronoun as referring to the implied category when talking to the same speaker but not when talking to a new speaker. Thus, children's conception of what constitutes common ground in discourse develops substantially between age 2 and 5.
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