Abstract

These studies examines when and how Korean speaking 3-year--old children and adults honor or suspend the mutual exclusivity assumption. When a novel label on the one novel animal picture was taught in Exp 1, most subjects interpreted it as a basic category name, but some as a proper name. In addition, they assigned the second label only to the members of an unnamed basic category if they had interpreted the first label as a basic category name, or only to one of unnamed stimuli. When a novel label was taught on the two animal in Exgs 2, each from the two basic categories of animal, they interpreted the label as a superodinate category name, and assigned the second label to the members of the unnamed superordinate category. The other three experiments have examined whether they coed accept two names to the same object by suspending mutual exclusivity. When the first label was given to a member of one basic category of a higher category, and the second label to the previously named stimulus and a member of the other basic category, 3-year-olds as well as adults accepted the two labels as category names from different category levels in Exp 3. When each of the two members of a basic category were given two labels each in Exp 4, they accepted them as names from different levels. In addition when the two labels were given to the same stimulus in Exp 5, they accepted them as synonyms. However, they avoided choosing the previously named stimuli for the referents for a third novel Label. These results suggest that mutual exclusivity is a default optional constraint on word meaning.