Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

We used a between-subjects selective trust paradigm to investigate whether 3-year-olds (N=28) and 5-year-olds (N=28)evaluate the quality of informants definitions for familiar and unfamiliar words. 3-year-olds did not choose the informativedefiner (silly=goofy) over the circular definer (silly=silly) for familiar or unfamiliar words. In contrast, 5-year-olds en-dorsed the informative definer for familiar (M=.71, t(12)=2.38, p=.04) and unfamiliar (M=.82, t(14)=3.41, p=.004) words.Additionally, 5-year-olds in the unfamiliar word condition chose to learn new information from the informative definer,such as asking about novel words (p¡. 001) and novel object functions (p¡.001). The unfamiliar word condition may haveelicited better performance than the familiar word condition because the contrast between the two informants was moreobvious. We are currently investigating whether 3- and 5-year-olds prefer an informant who uses familiar words to definenovel words (meager=small) to one that uses other novel words (meager=paltry).