Knowing how you know: Toddlers re-evaluate words learnt from an unreliable speaker

Abstract

There has been little investigation of the way source monitoring, the ability to track the source of one’s knowledge, may be involved in lexical acquisition. In two experiments, we tested whether toddlers (mean age 30 months) can monitor the source of their lexical knowledge and re-evaluate their implicit belief about a word mapping when this source is proven to be unreliable. Experiment 1 replicated previous research (Koenig and Woodward, 2010): children displayed better performance in a word learning test when they learnt words from a speaker who has previously revealed themselves as reliable (correctly labelling familiar objects) as opposed to an unreliable labeller (incorrectly labelling familiar objects). Experiment 2 then provided the critical test for source monitoring: children first learnt novel words from a speaker before watching that speaker labelling familiar objects correctly or incorrectly. Children who were exposed to the reliable speaker were significantly more likely to endorse the word mappings taught by the speaker than children who were exposed to a speaker who they later discovered was an unreliable labeller. Thus, young children can re-evaluate recently learned word mappings upon discovering that the source of their knowledge is unreliable. This suggests that children can monitor the source of their knowledge in order to decide whether that knowledge is justified, even at an age where they are not credited with the ability to verbally report how they have come to know what they know

Symbolic Behaviour in Artificial Intelligence

“…At around three years old, children also begin to exhibit an appreciation of language as a matter of convention. They assume that words will be known by speakers of the same language (but not others), they expect speakers of their language to use words in accordance with what they conventionally mean, they reinterpret or ignore noun-object bindings if a speaker is unreliable later, and (if they are bilingual) they mix languages less (Dautriche et al, 2020;Tomasello, 2019;Wei, 2020). At a similar age, they begin to show signs of considering what could be in the mind of others-what they might know or how they might intend to use a word (Diesendruck, 2005).…”

The effect of disagreement on children’s source memory performance

“…Studies of children's capacities to evaluate the reliability of speakers, for example, suggest that children track where information comes from for long enough to revise trust when a statement turns out to be inaccurate. Moreover, toddlers and preschoolers have been shown to not only monitor the reliability of speakers but to also appropriately revise their beliefs when new information about the speaker's reliability is revealed [28][29][30]. We term these functions 'individual' because they mainly concern the way a given individual manages their beliefs in the face of new information.…”