1999 Volume 47 Issue 2 Pages 209-217
Young children who are at the beginning of lexical acquisition are surrounded by unknown objects whose names are also unknown. If mutual exclusivity (Markman, 1989) is useful in lexical acquisition, then it must be demonstrated that mutual exclusivity is useful in environments where more than one object is novel. In the present experiments, an experimenter showed 58 Japanese 4-year-olds an object set of 1 known object and 3 novel objects, and examined whether they were able to use cues provided by the environment (joint attention cues and/or place knowledge cues), in addition to mutual exclusivity, and make inferences correctly about novel names. The results showed that if 4-year-old children are provided appropriate joint attention cues, they are able to specify the objects to be considered in making inferences and then, with seemingly simultaneous application of mutual exclusivity, to relate a novel word correctly with an appropriate referent.
