Carnegie Mellon University, United States of America.
Gallaudet University, United States of America.
Cognition. 2020 May;198:104191. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2020.104191. Epub 2020 Mar 3.
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.
当一个新单词和一个熟悉的以及一个新的指涉物出现时，儿童有一种倾向，即假设新单词指的是新的指涉物。这种倾向——通常被称为“互斥性”（ME）——被认为是儿童学习新单词含义的一种潜在强大途径，因此，它一直是大量实证研究和理论探讨的焦点。在这里，我们关注的是该倾向中两个在文献中相对较少受到关注的方面：发展和经验。一个成功的 ME 理论将需要解释为什么该效应的强度会随着儿童年龄的变化而变化。我们提供了一个定量描述，说明在发展过程中这种偏见的强度变化，并研究了语言经验在这种发展变化中所扮演的角色。我们首先通过元分析总结了当前实证研究结果的总体情况，然后展示了两项实验，这些实验检验了儿童的语言经验量与 ME 偏见强度之间的关系。我们的结论是，这种偏见的强度在发展过程中会发生巨大变化，而语言经验可能是导致这种变化的一个因果因素。在一般讨论中，我们描述了现有的 ME 理论如何解释我们的发现，并强调了计算建模对于未来理论化的价值。
