Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Convergent evidence suggests that the adult lexicon has evolved under pressure to efficiently satisfy a tradeoff between compressibility and informativeness, formally known as the Information Bottleneck (IB) principle. No work to date, however, has tested whether the same principle also impacts how children learn word meanings during development. Here, we address this open question in the domain of color by collecting color naming data from Hebrew speaking children across development (ages 3-12), and comparing it to color naming data from adults. Across ages, we find that children achieve near-optimal IB tradeoffs, with their color naming systems becoming more complex (less compressible) and more adult-like with age. Importantly, this pattern holds even though children's early color naming systems diverge from those of adults, implying that their efficiency is not merely a reflection of the efficiency of the adult system. These findings suggest that children's developmental trajectories of learning word meanings are guided by the same fundamental principle that shapes the adult lexicon.