Early word-object associations are non-selective

Mayor, J. 1 & Sia, M. Y. 2

1 Department of Psychology, University of Oslo
2 School of Psychology, The University of Nottingham Malaysia Campus

From around their second birthday, infants learn new words increasingly fast. The application of learning biases has been assumed to reduce referential ambiguity in naming situations, thus resulting in efficient vocabulary learning. One of these biases, Mutual Exclusivity, describes the tendency infants have of looking at novel objects when hearing novel labels, implicitly expecting both the formation of mappings between novel objects and novel words (a pre-requisite to word learning) and the rejection of second labels for name-known objects.
Three studies aimed at testing the selectivity of such word-object associations. The first two studies - a tablet-based study with 4- to 12-year-old children and an eye-tracking experiment with 21-month-old infants - suggested that associations between name-known objects and additional novel labels are, in fact, not inhibited. A third experiment, supplemented with computer simulations, ruled out cascaded activation patterns as an alternative explanation and, instead, confirmed that word-object associations are non-selective throughout infancy and childhood, in a manner not dissimilar to cross-situational statistical learning.
Our results provide converging evidence that infants and children are flexible when learning words and readily entertain the possibility that objects can have multiple names.