How Children Constrain Possible Word Meanings

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This research addresses a fundamental problem of language acquisition, how young children figure out the meanings of words. Children must determine what a novel word refers to from a limited amount of information about how a new term is used. Thus, word learning poses a difficult inductive problem for children. This research proceeds from the premise that part of the solution is that children focus quickly and effectively on the correct meaning of terms because they consider only some kinds of hypotheses. One way children may limit hypotheses is in accordance with the mutual exclusivity assumption, which states that children expect each object to have only one label. Although previous findings strongly suggest that preschool children use mutual exclusivity to guide their interpretation of a novel label, there is as yet little evidence about children beginning to acquire language. Moreover, alternative explanations for some of the findings have been raised. Controlled experimental tests of these alternative explanations will establish how mutual exclusivity is used by beginning language learners. The research will determine how mutual exclusivity supplements other information and how it provides children with a safeguard against certain errors. This work will enrich our understanding of how word-learning assumptions interact with cognitive, linguistic, and environmental factors to help very young children figure out what words mean. This improved understanding of the basic processes underlying language acquisition might better enable early childhood educators to provide learning environments that will facilitate word learning, and may promote more accurate diagnoses and more effective remediation of language disorders.