Young children often make pragmatic assumptions when learning new words. For example, they assume that a speaker who uses different words intends to refer to different things – the so-called principle of contrast. We used a standard disambiguation task to explore whether children’s assumptions about contrast depend on how much words differ. Three- to 6-year-olds heard pairs of words that differed in terms of the number, position, and types of phonological contrasts. Results indicate that children were less likely to disambiguate words differing by one phoneme than words differing by two or more phonemes, particularly when those one-phoneme differences were located at the beginning or end of the words (as in fim/vim). Overall, the findings suggest that children’s pragmatic assumptions about two contrasting words depend not only on if words differ, but also on how they differ.

幼儿在学习新单词时经常会做出务实的假设。例如，他们假设说话者使用不同的词语意在指代不同的事物——即所谓的对比原则。我们使用标准的消歧任务来探索儿童对对比的假设是否取决于单词的差异程度。三到六岁的孩子听到的单词对在数量、位置和语音对比类型方面有所不同。结果表明，与有两个或多个音素不同的单词相比，儿童更不可能消除由一个音素不同的单词的歧义，特别是当这些一个音素的差异位于单词的开头或结尾时（如 fim/vim）。总体而言，研究结果表明，儿童对两个对比词的实用假设不仅取决于词是否不同，还取决于它们的不同程度。