Children's use of mutual exclusivity to constrain the meanings of words

Markman, Ellen M.; Wachtel, Gwyn F

doi:10.1016/0010-0285(88)90017-5

Cited by 1,017 publications

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“…It is as if children are astounded at the very idea that a language would have terms for the hues of things. Many related results appear in the literature of vocabulary acquisition: Young children take shape as a more salient cue than size or color (Landau, Smith & Jones, 1998), they favor wholes over parts (Markman & Wachtel, 1988), objects over their component properties (Hall, Waxman & Hurwitz, 1993), and so forth. In none of these cases can it be argued that the children don't "see in color," "discriminate sizes," etc.…”

Section: Summary and Discussion Of The Findingsmentioning

confidence: 77%

When we think about thinking: The acquisition of belief verbs

2007

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Mental-content verbs such as think, believe, imagine and hope seem to pose special problems for the young language learner. One possible explanation for these difficulties is that the concepts that these verbs express are hard to grasp and therefore their acquisition must await relevant conceptual development. According to a different, perhaps complementary, proposal, a major contributor to the difficulty of these items lies with the informational requirements for identifying them from the contexts in which they appear. The experiments reported here explore the implications of these proposals by investigating the contribution of observational and linguistic cues to the acquisition of mental predicate vocabulary. We first demonstrate that particular observed situations can be helpful in prompting reference to mental contents, specifically, contexts that include a salient and/or unusual mental state such as a false belief. We then compare the potency of such observational support to the reliability of alternate or concomitant syntactic information (e.g., sentential complementation) in tasks where both children and adults are asked to hypothesize the meaning of novel verbs. The findings support the efficacy of false belief situations for increasing the saliency of mental state descriptions, but also show that syntactic information is a more reliable indicator of mentalistic interpretations than even the most cooperative contextual cues. Moreover, when syntactic and observational information sources converge, both children and simulated adult learners are vastly more likely to build conjectures involving mental verbs. This is consistent with a multiple-cue constraint satisfaction view of vocabulary acquisition. Taken together, our findings support the position that the informational demands of mapping, rather than age-related cognitive deficiency, can bear much of the explanatory burden for the learning problems posed by abstract words. Keywordstheory of mind; mental verbs; verb learning; syntactic bootstrapping; language acquisition --many of our complex ideas never had impressions that corresponded to them, and ...many of our complex impressions never are exactly copied in ideas.

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Section: Summary and Discussion Of The Findingsmentioning

confidence: 77%

When we think about thinking: The acquisition of belief verbs

2007

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“…It is predicted that performance on this task will approach ceiling, as typical in the literature (Haryu, 1991;Markman & Wachtel, 1988). In this and subsequent experiments we continue to employ a single False Belief task in view of the number of other measures and the young age of participants.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 89%

“…This tendency can be demonstrated experimentally using what is known as the disambiguation paradigm (e.g., Markman & Wachtel, 1988;Merriman & Bowman, 1989). In the presence of a familiar nameable object and an unfamiliar object children are asked to pick the referent of a novel name.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 96%

Metacognitive developments in word learning: Mutual exclusivity and theory of mind

Gollek

Doherty

2016

Journal of Experimental Child Psychology

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This study examines the flexibility with which children can use pragmatic information to determine word reference. Extensive previous research shows that children choose an unfamiliar object as referent of a novel name: the disambiguation effect. We added a pragmatic cue indirectly indicating a familiar object as intended referent. In three experiments, preschool children's ability to take this cue into account was specifically associated with false belief understanding and the ability to produce familiar alternative names (e.g., rabbit, animal) for a given referent. The association was predicted by the hypothesis that all three tasks require an understanding of perspective (linguistic or mental).The findings indicate that perspectival understanding is required to take into account indirect pragmatic information to suspend the disambiguation effect. Implications for lexical principles and socio-pragmatic theories of word learning are discussed.Keywords: word learning, mutual exclusivity bias, disambiguation effect, theory of mind, metacognition METACOGNITIVE DEVELOPMENTS IN WORD LEARNING 4 Metacognitive developments in word learning:Mutual Exclusivity and theory of mind A frequent observation, both in word learning research and in everyday life, is that young children appear to assume that each object kind has only one name. This tendency can be demonstrated experimentally using what is known as the disambiguation paradigm (e.g., Markman & Wachtel, 1988;Merriman & Bowman, 1989). In the presence of a familiar nameable object and an unfamiliar object children are asked to pick the referent of a novel name. For example, when shown a familiar apple, and an unfamiliar whisk, and asked to pick the "hinkle", children typically choose the novel object. This disambiguation effect is very robust and has been extensively used in research. It can be demonstrated from late infancy (e.g., Halberda, 2003;Markman, Wasow, & Hansen, 2003). It also constitutes a test case for differing theories about the nature of word learning, and about the relationship between word learning and metacognitive development. Determining the underlying cause of disambiguation is of broad theoretical importance.There are three general explanations of the phenomenon. (Others have proposed combinations of these explanations or hybrid accounts, e.g., Hollich, Hirsh-Pasek, & Golinkoff, 2000a, but we focus on these three for brevity.) The phenomenon is frequently identified as the 'Mutual Exclusivity bias ' (e.g., Markman, 1989;Merriman & Bowman, 1989), based on the idea that children assume word extensions to be mutually exclusive.Other lexical principles accounts have been proposed in which children prefer to map novel names to nameless categories (N3C; Golinkoff, Mervis, & Hirsh-Pasek, 1994) or vice versa (bias to fill lexical gaps, Merriman & Bowman, 1989). Unlike the Mutual Exclusivity bias, neither account predicts difficulty mapping novel names to nameable categories if other options are not apparent. METACOGNITIVE DEVELOPMENTS IN WORD...

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“…These alternative accounts make quite distinct predictions about the generality of children's responses in Markman and Wachtel's (1988) task. According to a lexical-constraints account, children's choice of an object without a name in response to a novel label was caused by their honoring a principle specific to word learning (the mutual exclusivity bias or the novel-name nameless-category principle) and therefore should occur only in word-learning contexts.…”

Section: Studymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Children chose the object without a name (e.g., the tongs) approximately 80% of the time (see also Bowman, 1989, andBertrand, 1994, for comparable results). Markman and Wachtel (1988) explained these findings by arguing that children adhered to a mutual exclusivity bias. That is, children assumed that an object could not have more than one label.…”

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confidence: 99%

Children's avoidance of lexical overlap: A pragmatic account.

Diesendruck

Markson²

2001

Developmental Psychology

360

333

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Children tend to choose an unfamiliar object rather than a familiar one when asked to find the referent of a novel name. This response has been taken as evidence for the operation of certain lexical constraints in children's inferences of word meanings. The present studies test an alternative-pragmatic-explanation of this phenomenon among 3-year-olds. In Study 1 children responded to a request for the referent of a novel label in the same way that they responded to a request for the referent of a novel fact. Study 2 intimated that children assume that labels are common knowledge among members of the same language community. Study 3 demonstrated that shared knowledge between a speaker and listener plays a decisive role in how children interpret a speaker's request. The findings suggest that 3-year-olds' avoidance of lexical overlap is not unique to naming and may derive from children's sensitivity to speakers' communicative intentions.How do children learn the meaning of words so efficiently given the complexity of the contexts in which most new words are encountered? One prevailing answer to this question is that children's inferences about word meanings are guided by a set of internal lexical constraints, biases, or principles that allow children to bypass consideration of most of the logically plausible meanings of a word (Golinkoff, Mervis, & Hirsh-Pasek, 1994;Markman, 1989;Waxman, 1990). For instance, it is argued that children believe that words denote whole objects, that labels refer to categories of objects rather than to individual objects, and that every object has only one name. A second line of thinking points out that young children are knowledgeable about various communication practices and are sensitive to a number of pragmatic cues present in the discourse context that indicate a speaker's communicative intent (L. Bloom, 1998). For instance, young children attend to the direction of a speaker's eye gaze to establish the referent of the speaker's utterance (Baldwin, 1993), they are sensitive to a speaker's affective and behavioral expressions as indicative of whether his or her communicative intent was accomplished (Tomasello,

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Children's use of mutual exclusivity to constrain the meanings of words

Cited by 1,017 publications

References 12 publications

When we think about thinking: The acquisition of belief verbs

When we think about thinking: The acquisition of belief verbs

Metacognitive developments in word learning: Mutual exclusivity and theory of mind

Children's avoidance of lexical overlap: A pragmatic account.

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