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Two‐year‐olds’ sensitivity to speakers’ intent: an alternative account of Samuelson and Smith
Author(s) -
Diesendruck Gil,
Markson Lori,
Akhtar Nameera,
Reudor Ayelet
Publication year - 2004
Publication title -
developmental science
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 2.801
H-Index - 127
eISSN - 1467-7687
pISSN - 1363-755X
DOI - 10.1111/j.1467-7687.2004.00320.x
Subject(s) - psychology , object (grammar) , context (archaeology) , cognitive psychology , word (group theory) , context effect , verbal learning , linguistics , developmental psychology , cognition , paleontology , philosophy , biology , neuroscience
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.