Abstract:
By their first birthdays infants are capable of learning new words quickly and know a lot about words. One aspect of this knowledge is that infants have a basic appreciation that words are conventional in nature and are able to utilise various constraints on word learning, like mutual exclusivity, to confine the potential meaning of a new label. The current study investigates whether 13-month-old infants are sensitive to the fact that object labels are mutually exclusive, that is, one object has one label by investigating if infants disambiguate two novel labels between two novel objects. A second goal of the study is to investigate whether a labelling frame in which a novel label is presented to infants influences infants’ ability to disambiguate between two object labels. To investigate these questions infants were habituated to a novel word-referent link either presented with a labelling frame (i.e., framed label condition) or without a labelling frame (i.e., bare label condition). Infants were then shown test events in which the same novel object as in habituation was labelled with a new label or a new object was labelled with a new label. The results demonstrate that infants found the event in which the new object was labelled with a new label most surprising. This pattern was similar for both conditions. Thus, the findings of the study suggest that, in the current experimental context, 13- month-old infants do not evidence the expectation that objects have only one label. The results also reveal that the labelling context did not influence infants’ performance in this task. That is, presenting a label in conjunction with a typical labelling frame did little to help infants to disambiguate. These findings suggest that infants’ ability to utilise labelling frames when determining the referent of a novel word may come from experience with language, rather than being an innate, driving force on language development.
