Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

How do learners gather new information during wordlearning? We present evidence that adult learners will chooseto receive additional training on object-label associations thatreduce ambiguity about reference during cross-situationalword learning. This ambiguity-reduction strategy is related toimproved test performance. We find mixed evidence thatchildren (4-8 years of age) show a similar preference to seekinformation about words experienced in ambiguous wordlearning situations. In an initial experiment, children did notpreferentially select object-label associations that remainedambiguous during cross-situational word learning. However,this may be explained by some children having relatively highcertainty about object-label associations for which they didnot see evidence disconfirming their initial hypothesis. In asecond experiment that increased the relative ambiguity oftwo sets of novel object-label associations, we found evidencethat children preferentially make selections that reduceambiguity about novel word meanings.