TY - JOUR
T1 - The role of developmental change and linguistic experience in the mutual exclusivity effect
AU - Lewis, Molly
AU - Cristiano, Veronica
AU - Lake, Brenden M.
AU - Kwan, Tammy
AU - Frank, Michael C.
N1 - Funding Information:
We would like to thank support from Cognitive ToyBox, and note that BML and TK are co-founders of Cognitive ToyBox which developed the two tablet applications in Experiment 1. We gratefully acknowledge Jesse Snedeker for the suggestion that led to Experiment 2, as well as for providing materials from de Marchena, Eigsti, Worek, Ono, and Snedeker (2011). Data from Experiment 2 were previously presented in the Proceedings of the Cognitive Science Society Conference in Lewis and Frank (2013).
Publisher Copyright:
© 2020
PY - 2020/5
Y1 - 2020/5
N2 - Given a novel word and a familiar and a novel referent, children have a bias to assume the novel word refers to the novel referent. This bias – often referred to as “Mutual Exclusivity” (ME) – is thought to be a potentially powerful route through which children might learn new word meanings, and, consequently, has been the focus of a large amount of empirical study and theorizing. Here, we focus on two aspects of the bias that have received relatively little attention in the literature: Development and experience. A successful theory of ME will need to provide an account for why the strength of the effect changes with the age of the child. We provide a quantitative description of the change in the strength of the bias across development, and investigate the role that linguistic experience plays in this developmental change. We first summarize the current body of empirical findings via a meta-analysis, and then present two experiments that examine the relationship between a child's amount of linguistic experience and the strength of the ME bias. We conclude that the strength of the bias varies dramatically across development and that linguistic experience is likely one causal factor contributing to this change. In the General Discussion, we describe how existing theories of ME can account for our findings, and highlight the value of computational modeling for future theorizing.
AB - Given a novel word and a familiar and a novel referent, children have a bias to assume the novel word refers to the novel referent. This bias – often referred to as “Mutual Exclusivity” (ME) – is thought to be a potentially powerful route through which children might learn new word meanings, and, consequently, has been the focus of a large amount of empirical study and theorizing. Here, we focus on two aspects of the bias that have received relatively little attention in the literature: Development and experience. A successful theory of ME will need to provide an account for why the strength of the effect changes with the age of the child. We provide a quantitative description of the change in the strength of the bias across development, and investigate the role that linguistic experience plays in this developmental change. We first summarize the current body of empirical findings via a meta-analysis, and then present two experiments that examine the relationship between a child's amount of linguistic experience and the strength of the ME bias. We conclude that the strength of the bias varies dramatically across development and that linguistic experience is likely one causal factor contributing to this change. In the General Discussion, we describe how existing theories of ME can account for our findings, and highlight the value of computational modeling for future theorizing.
KW - Disambiguation effect
KW - Meta-Analysis
KW - Mutual exclusivity
KW - Word learning
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U2 - 10.1016/j.cognition.2020.104191
DO - 10.1016/j.cognition.2020.104191
M3 - Article
C2 - 32143015
AN - SCOPUS:85080124204
SN - 0010-0277
VL - 198
JO - Cognition
JF - Cognition
M1 - 104191
ER -