Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

How flexible are children’s semantic representations? It is unknown whether children can adapt to different speaker’slanguage use and form speaker-specific representations to facilitate comprehension. Adults update their expectations abouthow a speaker uses quantifiers after exposure to the speaker (Yildirim et al., 2016). Here, we explore whether this abilityis also present in preschool-aged children. In Experiment 1, we show that preschoolers have adult-like expectations abouthow a generic speaker would use the quantifiers ’some’ (less than 50%) and ’many’ (greater than 50%). In Experiment 2,forty 4 and 5-year-olds (mean = 4.6) were exposed to a speaker who was biased to either prefer using ’some’ or ’many’ ina situation with a proportion of 50%. After exposure, participants updated their expectations about the use of ’some’ and’many’, such that they aligned better with the exposure speaker’s usage, suggesting that preschoolers are able to engage insemantic adaptation.