Children learn words in ambiguous situations, where multiple objects can potentially be referents for a new word. Yet, researchers debate whether children maintain a single word-object hypothesis – and revise it if falsified by later information – or whether children establish a network of word-object associations whose relative strengths are modulated with experience. To address this issue, we presented 4- to 12-year-old children with sets of mutual exclusivity (fast-mapping) trials: offering them with obvious initial hypotheses (that the novel object is the referent for the novel word). We observe that children aged six years and above, despite showing a novelty bias and retaining this novel word – novel object association, also formed an association between the novel word and the name-known object, thereby suggesting that older children attend to more than one word-object association, in a manner similar to associative learning. We discuss our findings in the context of competing theoretical accounts related to word learning.

Children employ multiple cues to identify the referent of a novel word. Novel words are often embedded in sentences and children have been shown to use syntactic cues to differentiate between types of words (adjective vs. nouns) and between types of nouns (count vs. mass nouns). In this study, we show that children learning Malay (N = 67), a numeral classifier language, can use syntactic cues to perform even finer-grained disambiguation-between count nouns. The manipulation of congruence between lexical and syntactic cues reveals a clear developmental trajectory: while 5-year-olds use predominantly lexical cues, older children increasingly rely on syntactic cues, such that by 7 years of age, they disambiguate between objects referred to with count nouns using syntactic rather than lexical cues. We are very thankful to Natalia Kartushina for her input on the manuscript, to all children who took part in the study, and to the principal and the staff of SK Taman Sri Sinar school for facilitating data collection. We are grateful to Suhaida Ibrahim, Intan Farhanan Che Mansor, Nuratiqah Aziemah Razali, Aliya Hadini Ahmad Nasaruddin, and Farah Azlin who provided us with an insight into the daily usage of the Malay language among native speakers.