Mutual exclusivity in cross-situational statistical learning

The Mutual Exclusivity (ME) constraint – a preference for mapping one word to one object – has been shown to be a powerful aid to children learning new words. We ask whether cross-situational language learning, in which word meanings are learned through computation of word-object co-occurrences across a series of highly ambiguous trials, is subject to the ME constraint. Our results show that participants can break the constraint to learn one-to-two word-referent mappings both when the referents are separated across time and when they are interleaved. This demonstrates the robustness of cross-situational statistical learning. We then use participants ’ ratings of their knowledge after individual trials to shed light on the underlying learning mechanism. Our results suggest that the ME constraint may be applied at multiple points along learning – within a single trial, across trials, and at test – which may explain one of its residual test effects found in the traditional language literature