“…Lexical competition has also been proposed to play an important role in word learning in children and adults (MacWhinney, 1989; McMurray, Horst, & Samuelson, 2012; Merriman, 1999), and is a central mechanism assumed by models of cross-situational word-referent learning (Frank, Goodman, & Tenenbaum, 2009; Kachergis, Yu, & Shiffrin, 2012; Regier, 2005; Siskind, 1996; Smith, Smith, & Blythe, 2011; Yu & Ballard, 2007). Although there is direct evidence of competition in lexical access (Allopenna et al, 1998; Howard, Coltheart, & Cole-Virtue, 2006; Oppenheim, Dell, & Schwartz, 2010), sentence comprehension (Bates & MacWhinney, 1989; Elman, Hare, & McRae, 2005; McRae, Spivey-Knowlton, & Tanenhaus, 1998), and in on-line word-referent disambiguation in children (e.g., Halberda, 2006; Horst, Scott, & Pollard, 2010; Markman, 1990; Merriman, Bowman, & MacWhinney, 1989; Swingley & Aslin, 2007; Yoshida, Tran, Benitez, & Kuwabara, 2011), there is no direct evidence for competition in cross-situational word-referent learning. Here we seek that evidence in the test of one common assumption about how that competition works: individual word-referent associations directly inhibit the pairing of other words with that referent.…”