Children's avoidance of lexical overlap: a pragmatic account.
Children tend to choose an unfamiliar object rather than a familiar one when asked to find the referent of a novel name. This response has been taken as evidence for the operation of certain lexical constraints in children's inferences of word meanings. The present studies test an alternative--pragmatic--explanation of this phenomenon among 3-year-olds. In Study 1 children responded to a request for the referent of a novel label in the same way that they responded to a request for the referent of a novel fact. Study 2 intimated that children assume that labels are common knowledge among members of the same language community. Study 3 demonstrated that shared knowledge between a speaker and listener plays a decisive role in how children interpret a speaker's request. The findings suggest that 3-year-olds' avoidance of lexical overlap is not unique to naming and may derive from children's sensitivity to speakers' communicative intentions.
Diesendruck
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Department of Psychology, Bar-Ilan University, Ramat Gan, Israel. dieseng@mail.biu.ac.il
Markson
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D002675:Child, Preschool; D003142:Communication; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D013060:Speech; D014705:Verbal Behavior; D014825:Vocabulary