Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

The present study examined the influence of continuity ofreference (i.e., discourse continuity) on children’s learning ofnew objects labels. Four-year-old children were taught threenew label/objects pairs, where the speaker’s references toobjects were either continuous (i.e., clusters of utterancesreferred to the same object) or discontinuous (i.e., no twosequential sentences referred to the same object). In twoexperiments, children learned new word/object mappingsmore successfully when object labels were accompanied bycontinuous references to the same object. This researchreveals how discourse cues support children’s encoding ofnew words, and in doing so, advances our understanding ofthe specific features of parents’ language input that facilitatechildren’s language development.