Two-year-olds exclude novel objects as potential referents of novelwords based on pragmatics

摘要

Many studies have established that children tend to exclude objects for which they alreadyhave a name as potential referents of novel words. In the current study we asked whetherthis exclusion can be triggered by social-pragmatic context alone without pre-existingwords as blockers. Two-year-old children watched an adult looking at a novel object whilesaying a novel word with excitement. In one condition the adult had not seen the objectbeforehand, and so the children interpreted the adult's utterance as referring to thegazed-at object. In another condition the adult and child had previously played jointly withthe gazed-at object. In this case, children less often assumed that the adult was referring tothe object but rather they searched for an alternative referent - presumably because theyinferred that the gazed-at object was old news in their common ground with the adult andso not worthy of excited labeling. Since this inference based on exclusion is highly similarto that underlying the Principle of Contrast/Mutual Exclusivity, we propose that this prin-ciple is not purely lexical but rather is based on children's understanding of how and whypeople direct one another's attention to things either with or without language.