Is 2-year-old children’s referential disambiguation of a novel word primarily aimed at identifying the word meaning or at understanding their communicative partner?

Pragmatics aid referent disambiguation and word learning in young children and adults

“…Thus, we did not find evidence for children's (or adults’) guidance by object novelty alone in situations of referential ambiguity. This result is in line with research highlighting the role of pragmatics in interpreting cues of novelty (Akhtar et al., 1996; Graham et al., 2005; Grassmann et al., 2009; Marno, 2021), but contrasts with studies focusing on the role of internal novelty biases in children's disambiguation (Dysart et al., 2016; Horst et al., 2011; Mather & Plunkett, 2012). In contrast to the latter line of research, the pre‐exposure phase in our non‐pragmatic condition did not involve another person or human voice that introduced this object to the participants.…”

“…This set of findings suggests that children as young as two can use pragmatic context to disambiguate novel words: They understand that a speaker's excitement refers to a novel object, rather than a preexposed one, if the speaker already attended to the latter. This is in line with previous research highlighting early pragmatic abilities in referent disambiguation (Akhtar et al, 1996;Bohn, Le, et al, 2021;Liebal et al, 2009;Marno, 2021;Moll et al, 2006Tomasello & Haberl, 2003) and demonstrates the important role of pragmatic processes and common ground information in resolving referential ambiguity. Importantly, we find the same pattern of results in our pre-registered online study using a different scenario, response measure and testing format.…”

“…However, others argue children only consider these cues within the pragmatic context. Children are similarly able to exclude the newest object in the scene as the correct referent, if the discourse context suggests this to be sensible (Graham et al., 2005; Grassmann et al., 2009; Marno, 2021) or select objects that are novel for their conversation partner, but not themselves (Akhtar et al., 1996). In this line, previous results in which children favored the most novel object (Dysart et al., 2016; Mather & Plunkett, 2012) could be explained by pragmatic inferences like “If she meant the pre‐exposed object, she would have named it earlier.”…”

Young children and adults use reasoning by exclusion rather than attraction to novelty to disambiguate novel word meanings.

“…The first of these studies found that, upon hearing a novel word, 22-montholds shifted their gaze to the most novel object on the screen (versus a well-known object and an unknown, but pre-exposed object; experiment 1), beyond baseline preferences. However, in their second, more stringent test of the effect of object novelty, in which the novel and the pre-exposed object were in direct competition (and no familiar object was shown), they could not replicate this overall effect 1 (see also Bleijlevens et al, 2023;Graham et al, 2005;Marno, 2021 for findings that pragmatic factors, rather than novelty, drive young children's disambiguation). Based on such mixed patterns of results 2 , and especially considering the 1 In this more stringent test, Mather and Plunkett (2012) found a significant effect only in their third trial, but not in the first two trials nor in the overall analysis across trials.…”