How children block learning from ignorant speakers

摘要

Preschool children typically do not learn words from ignorant or unreliable speakers. Here,we examined the mechanism by which these learning failures occur by modifying the com-prehension test procedure that measures word learning. Following lexical training by aknowledgeable or ignorant speaker, 48 preschool-aged children were asked either a stan-dard comprehension test question (i.e., "Which one is the blicket") or a question about thelabeling episode (i.e., "Which one did I say is the blicket"). Immediately after training, chil-dren chose the object labeled by an ignorant speaker when asked the episode question, butnot when asked the semantic question. However, the advantage for episode questions dis-appeared when the same children were asked after a brief delay. These findings show thatchildren encode their experiences with ignorant speakers, but do not form semantic repre-sentations on the basis of those experiences.