Why Do Children Think Words Are Mutually Exclusive?

How do children learn what a word means when its uses are consistent with many possible meanings? One influential idea is that children rely on an inductive bias that ensures that novel words get assigned distinct meanings from known words-. Here, we explore the possibility that mutual-exclusivity phenomena do not reflect a bias but rather information encoded in the message. Learners might effectively be told when (and when not) to assume that word meanings are mutually exclusive.

Mapping words to the world: Adults, but not children, understand how mismatching descriptions refer.

How do children learn to connect expressions (e.g., "that red apple") to the real-world objects they refer to? The dominant view in developmental psychology is that children rely on descriptive information, "red" and "apple.

Properties of LoTs: The footprints or the bear itself?

There are two ways to understand any proposed properties of language-of-thoughts (LoTs): As diagnostic or constitutive. We argue that this choice is critical. If candidate properties are diagnostic, their homeostatic clustering requires explanation via an underlying homeostatic mechanism.

It's not just what we don't know: The mapping problem in the acquisition of negation.

How do learners learn what no and not mean when they are only presented with what is? Given its complexity, abstractness, and roles in logic, truth-functional negation might be a conceptual accomplishment. As a result, young children's gradual acquisition of negation words might be due to their undergoing a gradual conceptual change that is necessary to represent those words' logical meaning. However, it's also possible that linguistic expressions of negation take time to learn because of children's gradually increasing grasp of their language.

Conflict paradigms cannot reveal competence.

De Neys is right to criticize the in dual-process theories, but he misses the original sin underlying this assumption, which his working model continues to share. , in which experimenters measure how one cognitive process interferes (or does not interfere) with another, license few inferences about how the interfered-with process works on its own.