The role of developmental change and linguistic experience in the mutual exclusivity effect

Lewis, Molly; Cristiano, Veronica; Lake, Brenden M.; Kwan, Tammy; Frank, Michael C.

doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2020.104191

Cited by 47 publications

(74 citation statements)

References 77 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…If the known object is something less familiar, such as a chess piece (e.g., a pawn), a 3-year-old child may draw a weaker inference, if they draw any inference at all. [50][51][52] Taken together, the child has the opportunity to integrate their assumptions about (1) cooperative communication, (2) their understanding of the common ground, and (3) their existing semantic knowledge. In one condition of the experiment, information sources were aligned ( Fig.…”

Section: From Early In Development Children Use Several Different Mementioning

confidence: 99%

How young children integrate information sources to infer the meaning of words

Bohn¹,

Tessler²,

Merrick³

et al. 2020

Preprint

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Before formal education begins, children typically acquire a vocabulary of thousands of words. This learning process requires the use of many different information sources in their social environment, including their current knowledge state as well as the context in which they hear words used. How is this information integrated? We specify a model according to which children consider all available information sources and integrate them via Bayesian inference. This model accurately predicted 2-to-5 year-old children’s word learning across a range of experimental conditions. Model comparison suggests that the integration process is stable across development and that the main locus of development is an increased sensitivity to individual information sources. We present a quantitative developmental theory of information integration for language learning, embedded in a larger framework that grounds language use and learning in social cognition.

show abstract

Section: From Early In Development Children Use Several Different Mementioning

confidence: 99%

How young children integrate information sources to infer the meaning of words

Bohn¹,

Tessler²,

Merrick³

et al. 2020

Preprint

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Larger productive vocabularies correspond to common words being better learned. Lewis et al (2019) also provide direct evidence that the strength with which recently taught names are known affects their likelihood to cause the disambiguation effect when the object is paired with a novel object (Au & Glusman, 1990).…”

Section: The Mutual Exclusivity Biasmentioning

confidence: 82%

“…The effect can be observed from infancy on using eye-tracking (Halberda, 2003). A recent meta-analysis of the disambiguation effect (Lewis, Cristiano, Lake, Kwan, & Frank, 2019) finds that from infancy until 5 years the strength of the bias increases. Lewis et al attribute this increase to independent effects of vocabulary size and of age.…”

Section: The Mutual Exclusivity Biasmentioning

confidence: 99%

Mental files: Developmental integration of dual naming and theory of mind

Doherty

Perner

2020

Developmental Review

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

We use mental files theory to provide an integral theory of children's diverse dual naming problems and why these problems are overcome when children pass the false belief test. When an object is encountered under different appearances or given different verbal labels, two distinct representations (mental files) may be deployed for that single object. The resulting files refer to the same object but capture different perspectives on the object. Such coreferential files can thus be used to represent people's differing perspectives (e.g., belief). Typically the existence of different files indicates the existence of two separate objects. To mark that only a single object is involved, coreferential files need to be linked. Development of the ability to link files provides a powerful developmental explanation for success on dual labelling and perspective tasks at the same age, around 4 years: processing identity statements, overcoming mutual exclusivity (accepting different labels for an object), visual perspective taking, and understanding differences of belief. Mental files also provide a new framework for understanding conceptual pacts and their relation to mutual exclusivity in children and adults.

show abstract

“…As a consequence, the fact that the speaker did not use the known label tells the listener that the speaker is not referring to the known object, which makes the novel object the more likely referent for the novel word (seen Frank, Goodman, & Tenenbaum, 2009 for a formal analysis). On this view, mutual exclusivity should be tightly linked to the listener's lexical knowledge, a prediction that is supported by data on the correlation between vocabulary size and mutual exclusivity inferences (Lewis, et al, 2019). 7…”

Section: Word Learning Through Pragmatic Inferencementioning

confidence: 92%

“…A large number of theoretical explanations have been put forward for this "mutual exclusivity" effect (see Lewis, Cristiano, Lake, Kwan & Frank, 2019 for an overview and meta-analysis). Because of its parsimony with our general framework, we favor a pragmatic explanation as at least one possible source of the effect (E. V. Clark, 1988;E.…”

Section: Word Learning Through Pragmatic Inferencementioning

confidence: 99%

The pervasive role of pragmatics in early language

Bohn¹,

Frank²

2019

Preprint

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Language is a fundamentally social endeavor. Pragmatics is the study of how speakers and listeners use social reasoning to go beyond the literal meanings of words to interpret language in context. In this review, we take a pragmatic perspective on language development and argue for developmental continuity between early non-verbal communication, language learning, and linguistic pragmatics. We link phenomena from these different literatures by relating them to a computational framework (the rational speech act framework), which conceptualizes communication as fundamentally inferential and grounded in social cognition. The model specifies how different information sources (linguistic utterances, social cues, common ground) are combined when making pragmatic inferences. We present evidence in favor of this inferential view and review how pragmatic reasoning supports children’s learning, comprehension, and use of language.

show abstract

The role of developmental change and linguistic experience in the mutual exclusivity effect

Cited by 47 publications

References 77 publications

How young children integrate information sources to infer the meaning of words

How young children integrate information sources to infer the meaning of words

Mental files: Developmental integration of dual naming and theory of mind

The pervasive role of pragmatics in early language

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About