Young word learners' interpretations of words and symbolic gestures within the context of ambiguous reference.

Early in development, many word-learning phenomena generalize to symbolic gestures. The current study explored whether children avoid lexical overlap in the gestural modality, as they do in the verbal modality, within the context of ambiguous reference. Eighteen-month-olds' interpretations of words and symbolic gestures in a symbol-disambiguation task (Experiment 1) and a symbol-learning task (Experiment 2) were investigated.