Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

What is the mechanism by which linguistic knowledge is updated over time? In six experiments, we asked whether error-driven learning can explain how adults and children add new words to their vocabulary. Participants were exposed tonovel object labels that were more or less unexpected given participants linguistic knowledge. Two-to-four-year-olds werestrongly affected by expectations based on contextual constraint when choosing the referent of a new label. However,while adults formed stronger memory traces for novel words that violated a stronger prior expectation, childrens memorywas unaffected by the strength of their prior expectations. We conclude that the encoding of new words in memory followsthe principles of error-driven learning in adults, but not in preschoolers.