When Language Background Does Not Matter: Both Mono- and Bilingual Children Use Mutual Exclusivity and Pragmatic Context to Learn Novel Words.

Do mono- and bilingual children differ in the way they learn novel words in ambiguous settings? Listeners may resolve referential ambiguity by assuming that novel words refer to unknown, rather than known, objects-a response known as the mutual exclusivity effect. Past research suggested that mono- and bilinguals differ with regard to this disambiguation strategy, perhaps because, across languages, bilinguals' experience contradicts one-to-one mappings of label and referent. Another line of research suggested a bilingual advantage in resolving referential ambiguity, based on bilinguals' advanced pragmatic skills.

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

Upon hearing a novel label, listeners tend to assume that it refers to a novel, rather than a familiar object. While this disambiguation or mutual exclusivity (ME) effect has been robustly shown across development, it is unclear what it involves. Do listeners use their pragmatic and lexical knowledge to exclude the familiar object and thus select the novel one? Or is the effect, at least in early childhood, simply based on an attraction to novelty and a direct mapping of the novel label to a novel object? In a preregistered online study with 2- to 3-year-olds ( = 75) and adults ( = 112), we examined (a) whether relative object novelty alone (without pragmatic or lexical information) could account for participants' disambiguation and (b) whether participants' decision processes involved reasoning by exclusion.

The cognitive underpinnings and early development of children's selective trust.

Young children learn selectively from reliable over unreliable sources. However, the cognitive underpinnings of their selectivity (attentional biases or trait ascriptions) and its early ontogeny are unclear. Thus, across three studies (N = 139, monolingual German speakers, 67 female), selective-trust tasks were adapted to test both preschoolers (5-year-olds) and toddlers (24-month-olds), using eye-tracking and interactive measures.

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

How do children succeed in learning a word? Research has shown robustly that, in ambiguous labeling situations, young children assume novel labels to refer to unfamiliar rather than familiar objects. However, ongoing debates center on the underlying mechanism: Is this behavior based on lexical constraints, guided by pragmatic reasoning, or simply driven by children's attraction to novelty? Additionally, recent research has questioned whether children's disambiguation leads to long-term learning or rather indicates an attentional shift in the moment of the conversation. Thus, we conducted a pre-registered online study with 2- and 3-year-olds and adults.