Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Children's word learning often occurs under referential ambiguity, but linguistic context can drastically reduce this ambiguity and facilitate accurate word learning. Here, we examined whether linguistic context also facilitates word learning across exposures, testing 3-year-olds' ability to use a word's prior linguistic context to constrain subsequent mappings. To test this, we conducted three studies using semantically informative verbs, comparing children's use of linguistic context to infer meanings within a single exposure (Study 1 & 3) or across exposures (Study 2 & 3). We also varied the noun's salience in the discourse context between exposures. Results indicated that children successfully used familiar verbs to infer novel noun meanings both when the verb and referent co-occurred within an exposure and when they were separated across exposures. However, children were less successful when linguistic and referential contexts were separated. Thus, 3-year-olds use prior linguistic contexts to infer word meanings as a conversation progresses.