Where’s the Advantage? Mutual Exclusivity Promotes Children’s Initial Mapping, but Not Long-Term Memory, for Words Compared to Other Strategies

Children frequently apply a novel label to a novel object, a behavior known as the mutual exclusivity bias (MEB). This study examined how MEB affects children’s retention for word mappings. In Experiment 1, preschoolers (N = 39; M(age) = 46.62 months) and adults (N = 24; M(age) = 21.63 years) completed an immediate word mapping task and a delayed retention test. Both samples used MEB during referent selection, but neither group displayed higher retention for words mapped via MEB than words mapped via other referent selection strategies at test. Experiment 2 replicated Experiment 1 with preschoolers (N = 85; M(age) = 47.78 months) and provided evidence against the possibility that interference from multiple words contributed to children’s faster forgetting of word mappings when using MEB. Experiment 3 presented children (N = 30; M(age) = 51.13 months) with an abbreviated version of the task, providing evidence against the alternative hypothesis that cognitive load during learning caused the forgetting observed in Experiments 1 and 2. Taken together, these experiments suggest that MEB supports initial word mapping but may not provide an advantage for long-term retention.