When linguistic information alone does not clarify a speaker's intended meaning, skilled communicators can draw on a variety of cues to infer communicative intent. In this paper, we review research examining the developmental emergence of preschoolers' sensitivity to a communicative partner's perspective. We focus particularly on preschoolers'…

We explored 12-month-olds' flexibility in accepting phonotactically illegal or ill-formed word forms in a modified associative-learning task. Sixty-four English-learning infants were presented with a training phase that either clarified the purpose of a sound--object association task or left the task ambiguous. Infants were then habituated to sets…

We assessed the effect of specificity of speaker information about an object on three-year-olds' word mappings. When children heard a novel label followed by specific information about an object at exposure, children subsequently mapped the label to that object at test. When children heard only specific information about an object at exposure,…

Three experiments investigated the developmental progression of reliance on object function versus object shape to extend novel words among 3- and 5-year olds and adults. Findings indicated that children focused on shape, whereas adults focused on function when extending novel words, suggesting a developmental change in the consideration of these…