Mayor, J. 1, 2
1 The University of Nottingham Malaysia Campus
2 FPSE, University of Geneva
Infants become efficient word users late in their second year of life. They learn new words increasingly fast, despite the fact that, in typical naming situations, novel names may have a very large set of potential referents. Markman (1989) suggested that infants make use of lexical biases when assigning labels to objects and that the application of these lexical constraints coincide with the observed acceleration in vocabulary learning. One of these biases described the tendency infants have to map novel labels to novel objects, a bias called Mutual Exclusivity (ME). It is typically considered that that application of ME implies the rejection of a second label via a high-level constraint that inhibits the association of a second label for a name-known object. In the present contribution I present evidence from an eye-tracking study with 21-month-old infants, that associations between name-known objects and additional novel labels are in fact not inhibited, thus refuting claims that infants reject a second label for a name-known object. In contrast, this suggests that the formation of word-object associations during ME situations is non-selective and that word learning subsequent to ME operates in a manner similar to cross-situational statistical learning (Smith & Yu, 2008).