Young Children's Disambiguation of Object Name Reference

Children show a disambiguation effect--a tendency to select unfamiliar rather than familiar things as the referents of new names. In previous studies, this effect has been reversed in young 2-year-olds, but not older children, by preexposing the unfamiliar objects, suggesting that attraction to novelty controls 2-years-olds' choices of referents for new names, but a mutual exclusivity and/or lexical gap-filling principle determines preschoolers' selections. Both the disambiguation effect and its reversal by preexposure were replicated in the present study; however, 24-month-olds' rate of selecting unfamiliar over familiar kinds was less when they were simply asked to choose between the items than when they were asked to identify the referents of unfamiliar names. Thus, some young children may have both an attraction to novel tokens and a tendency to honor an abstract lexical principle. Referent selections were also affected by object typicality and word similarity. Correlations between the tendency to acknowledge a new name's unfamiliarity and to treat it like a similar-sounding familiar name suggested that youngsters' phonological matching skills affect their interpretation of new names. Also, 4-year-olds who most often mapped distinctive-sounding new names to unfamiliar kinds tended to admit their unfamiliarity with these names most frequently, suggesting that children's increasing awareness of their own knowledge begins to affect their lexical processing during the preschool years.