Do children always conform to a majority’s testimony, or do
the pragmatics of that testimony matter? We investigate
children’s reasoning about mapping a novel word to a referent
in an object-labeling task. Across four conditions, we
modified the testimony in an object-labeling task, to account
for pragmatic principles, so that the majority does and does
not provide an explicit opinion about the alternative object
chosen by the minority. Four- and 5-year-olds were given a
choice between an object endorsed by a three-person
majority, or one endorsed by a single minority informant. In
the unendorsed condition, informants explicitly unendorsed
the unchosen object. In the nothing condition, informants said
nothing about the unchosen object. In the ignorance
condition, informants explicitly expressed uncertainty about
the unchosen object, and in the hidden condition, the chosen
object was the only one present at the time of the
endorsement. Children were most likely to endorse the
majority object in the unendorsed condition, in which the
majority explicitly stated that the label applied to only one
referent, whereas in the hidden condition, where only one
object at a time was present in the discourse, children chose
objects endorsed by the majority and the minority equally,
with the other two conditions intermediate. This suggests that
children might not simply have a conformity bias; rather, they
are sensitive to the majority’s implied intentions when
learning from testimony.