Children learn words in ambiguous situations, where multiple objects can potentially be referents for a new word. Yet, researchers debate whether children maintain a single word-object hypothesis – and revise it if falsified by later information – or whether children establish a network of word-object associations whose relative strengths are modulated with experience. To address this issue, we presented 4- to 12-year-old children with sets of mutual exclusivity (fast-mapping) trials: offering them with obvious initial hypotheses (that the novel object is the referent for the novel word). We observe that children aged six years and above, despite showing a novelty bias and retaining this novel word – novel object association, also formed an association between the novel word and the name-known object, thereby suggesting that older children attend to more than one word-object association, in a manner similar to associative learning. We discuss our findings in the context of competing theoretical accounts related to word learning.

孩子们在模棱两可的情况下学习单词，在这种情况下，多个对象可能成为一个新单词的参考对象。然而，研究人员争论儿童是否保持单一的词对象假设——如果被后来的信息证伪，则对其进行修改——或者孩子是否建立了一个词对象关联网络，其相对强度受经验的调节。为了解决这个问题，我们向 4 到 12 岁的儿童展示了一组互斥性（快速映射）试验：为他们提供明显的初始假设（新对象是新词的指称）。我们观察到六岁及以上的儿童，尽管表现出新奇偏见并保留了这个新词——新对象联想，但也形成了新词和已知名字之间的关联。对象，从而表明年龄较大的孩子以类似于联想学习的方式关注不止一个词-对象关联。我们在与单词学习相关的相互竞争的理论解释的背景下讨论我们的发现。