Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

When do children extend a construction (“rule”) productively?A recent Threshold proposal claims that a construction isproductive if and only if it has been witnessed applying to asufficient proportion of cases and sufficiently few exceptions.An alternative proposal, Communicate and Access (C&A),argues that children extend a construction productively becausethey wish to express an intended message and are unable toaccess a “better” (appropriate and more conventional) way todo so. Accessibility, in turn, is negatively affected byinterference from competing alternatives. In a preregisteredexperiment, 32 4-6-year-old children were provided withexposure to 2 mini-artificial languages for which the twoproposals make opposite predictions. Results support the C&Aproposal: children were more productive after witnessing 3rule-following cases than after 5, due to differences ininterference. We conclude that productivity is encouraged by adesire to communicate a message and is constrained byaccessibility and interference.