Two-year-olds' sensitivity to speakers' intent: an alternative account of Samuelson and Smith.
Seventy-two 2-year-olds participated in a study designed to test two competing accounts of the effect of contextual change on children's ability to learn a word for an object. The mechanistic account hypothesizes that any change in context that highlights a target object will lead to word learning; the social-pragmatic account maintains that a change in context must be perceived as relevant to the speaker's communicative intentions. Consistent with the latter account, we found that children learned the word when a change in context was intentional but not when it was accidental, and children failed to learn the word for the highlighted object when a speaker naive to the preceding context named the object.
Department of Psychology Bar-Ilan University, Israel. dieseng@mail.biu.ac.il
Gil
G
Diesendruck
Lori
L
Markson
Nameera
N
Akhtar
Ayelet
A
Reudor
D002675:Child, Preschool; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D033182:Intention; D007802:Language; D007804:Language Development; D008297:Male; D011578:Psycholinguistics; D013067:Speech Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D014706:Verbal Learning / Q000502:physiology*