Do context cues help preschoolers learn words by differentiating between reliable and unreliable informants?

Abstract

The present study investigates if 4-year-old children use people’s pragmatic competence as a standard for learning from them. In this study we define a person’s pragmatic competence by their ability to adhere to the Gricean maxim of relation. The children were divided into three conditions with different levels of verbal context, a no context condition, a rich context condition and a richer context condition. Four-year-olds did not perform differently based on the level of context they received. A linear regression revealed that children’s ability to answer comprehension questions correctly while watching a video, predicted their performance on the word-learning task.