Two-year-olds' sensitivity to speakers' intent: An alternative account of Samuelson and Smith

Gil Diesendruck, Lori Markson, Nameera Akhtar, Ayelet Reudor

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

56 Scopus citations

Abstract

Seventy-two 2-year-olds participated in a study designed to test two competing accounts of the effect of contextual change on children's ability to learn a word for an object. The mechanistic account hypothesizes that any change in context that highlights a target object will lead to word learning; the social-pragmatic account maintains that a change in context must be perceived as relevant to the speaker's communicative intentions. Consistent with the latter account, we found that children learned the word when a change in context was intentional but not when it was accidental, and children failed to learn the word for the highlighted object when a speaker naive to the preceding context named the object.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)33-41
Number of pages9
JournalDevelopmental Science
Volume7
Issue number1
DOIs
StatePublished - Feb 2004

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