The role of pragmatics in early word learning
Cumulative thesis
Date of Examination:2024-08-12
Date of issue:2024-10-10
Advisor:Dr. Tanya Behne
Referee:Dr. Tanya Behne
Referee:Prof. Dr. Nivedita Mani
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Abstract
English
Young children show remarkable abilities in learning words from highly ambiguous surroundings. Regardless how many languages they learn, they seem to have no effort in linking a novel word to its correct meaning. Social-pragmatic theories explain children’s success by their ability to interpret language as a communicative act in a rich social context. From early ontogeny on, children can rely on a broader set of socio-cognitive skills to understand the communicative intentions of a speaker and infer the meanings of novel words. This dissertation aims to investigate the role of pragmatics in the processes underlying children’s early word learning. Across three preregistered online studies, the assumptions of pragmatic theories were tested against competing accounts. Study 1 investigated the role of reason by exclusion in monolingual 2-to-3-year-olds’ (and adults’) referent disambiguation and learning. Across different conditions and behavioral measures, we found that children and adults did not link a novel word directly to the most novel object in the scene. Rather, they relied on their lexical and pragmatic knowledge to exclude unlikely referents before deciding on the most probable one. After a delay, children remembered the newly learned word-object mappings, although only fragilely. Study 2 aimed to assess whether monolingual 2-to-3-year-olds (and adults) can infer and learn novel word meanings in the absence of lexical information by considering the pragmatic context. To find the referent of a novel word, both age groups successfully relied on the common ground with the speaker (here: their expectation that others get excited by new things). Their inferences were not reducible to the attraction to perceptual novelty alone. The pragmatic context enhanced participants’ certainty during disambiguation and led to learning success after a delay. Study 3 investigated whether 3-year-olds’ (and adults’) language background impacts the word learning strategies and pragmatic skills that monolinguals successfully used in Studies 1 and 2. Against competing proposals, comparable samples of mono- and bilinguals did not differ in their referent disambiguation and learning. They relied on their lexical and pragmatic knowledge to infer and remember the meanings of novel words, no matter if they acquired one or more languages. The pattern of results contributes to the theoretical debate on the mechanisms underlying children’s word learning. They suggest that children do not need lexical knowledge to resolve referential ambiguity, nor do they seem to rely on lower-level associative mechanisms alone. Instead, children’s socio-cognitive understanding has the power not only to guide their social interactions, but also to enable their language acquisition.
Keywords: word learning; pragmatics; mutual exclusivity; common ground; disambiguation; bilingualism; disjunctive syllogism