Mutual Exclusivity as a Special Case of Cross-Situational Statistical Learning: Non-Selectivity of Word-Object Associations

Children learn words in ambiguous situations, where multiple objects can potentially be referents for a new word. Yet, researchers debate whether children form and 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 trials, thereby offering them with obvious initial hypotheses – that the novel object is the referent for the novel word. Despite their initial preference for the novel object, children maintained an association between the novel word and the name-known object, thus suggesting that early word-object associations are non-selective, in a manner not dissimilar to cross-situational statistical learning.