Children's avoidance of lexical overlap: A pragmatic account

Children tend to choose an unfamiliar object rather than a familiar one when asked to find the referent of a novel name. This response has been taken as evidence for the operation of certain lexical constraints in children's inferences of word meanings. The present studies test an alternative—pragmatic—expla-nation of this phenomenon among 3-year-olds. In Study 1 children responded to a request for the referent of a novel label in the same way that they responded to a request for the referent of a novel fact. Study 2 intimated that children assume that labels are common knowledge among members of the same language community. Study 3 demonstrated that shared knowledge between a speaker and listener plays a decisive role in how children interpret a speaker's request. The findings suggest that 3-year-olds ' avoidance of lexical overlap is not unique to naming and may derive from children's sensitivity to speakers' communicative intentions. How do children learn the meaning of words so efficiently given the complexity of the contexts in which most new words are encountered? One prevailing answer to this question is that chil-dren's inferences about word meanings are guided by a set of internal lexical constraints, biases, or principles that allow childre