Social Pragmatics: Preschoolers Rely on Commonsense Psychology to Resolve Referential Underspecification.

Four experiments show that 4- and 5-year-olds (total N = 112) can identify the referent of underdetermined utterances through their Naïve Utility Calculus-an intuitive theory of people's behavior structured around an assumption that agents maximize utilities. In Experiments 1-2, a puppet asked for help without specifying to whom she was talking ("Can you help me?"). In Experiments 3-4, a puppet asked the child to pass an object without specifying what she wanted ("Can you pass me that one?"). Children's responses suggest that they considered cost trade-offs between the members in the interaction. These findings add to a body of work showing that reference resolution is informed by commonsense psychology from early in childhood.

Word meaning is complex: Language-related generalization differences in autistic adults.

The current study marries two important observations. First, there is a growing recognition that word meanings need to be flexibly extended in new ways as new contexts arise. Second, as evidenced primarily within the perceptual domain, autistic individuals tend to find generalization more challenging while showing stronger veridical memory in comparison to their neurotypical peers. Here we report that a group of 80 autistic adults finds it more challenging to flexibly extend the meanings of familiar words in new ways than a group of 80 neurotypical peers, while the autistic individuals outperform the neurotypicals on a novel word-learning task that does not require flexible extension. Results indicate that recognized differences in generalization present an ongoing challenge for autistic adults in the domain of language, separate from social cognition, executive function, or the ability to assign single fixed meanings to new words.

Children make use of relationships across meanings in word learning.

Many words are associated with more than a single meaning. Words are sometimes "ambiguous," applying to unrelated meanings, but the majority of frequent words are "polysemous" in that they apply to multiple related meanings. In a preregistered design that included 2 tasks, we tested adults' and 4.5- to 7-year-old children's ability to learn 4 novel polysemous words or 4 novel ambiguous words. Both children and adults demonstrated a polysemy over ambiguity learning advantage on each task after exposure, showing better learning of novel words with multiple related meanings than novel words with unrelated meanings. Stimuli in the polysemy condition were designed and then normed to guard against learners relying on a simple definition to distinguish the multiple target meanings for each word from foils. We retested available participants after a week-long delay without providing additional exposure and found that adults' performance remained strong in the polysemy condition in 1 task, and children's performance remained strong in the polysemy condition in both tasks. We conclude that participants are adept at learning polysemous words that vary along multiple dimensions. Current results are consistent with the idea that ambiguous meanings of a word compete, but polysemous meanings instead reinforce one another. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Brief Report: Children on the Autism Spectrum are Challenged by Complex Word Meanings.

The current work suggests that two factors conspire to make vocabulary learning challenging for youth on the Autism spectrum: (1) a tendency to focus on specifics rather than on relationships among entities and (2) the fact that most words are associated with distinct but related meanings (e.g. baseball cap, pen cap, bottle cap). Neurotypical (NT) children find it easier to learn multiple related meanings of words (polysemy) in comparison to multiple unrelated meanings (homonymy). We exposed 60 NT children and 40 verbal youth on the Autism spectrum to novel words. The groups' performance learning homonyms was comparable, but unlike their NT peers, youth on the spectrum did not display the same advantage for learning polysemous words compared to homonyms.

Children understand that agents maximize expected utilities.

A growing set of studies suggests that our ability to infer, and reason about, mental states is supported by the assumption that agents maximize utilities-the rewards they attain minus the costs they incur. This assumption enables observers to work backward from agents' observed behavior to their underlying beliefs, preferences, and competencies. Intuitively, however, agents may have incomplete, uncertain, or wrong beliefs about what they want. More formally, agents try to maximize their expected utilities. This understanding is crucial when reasoning about others' behavior: It dictates when actions reveal preferences, and it makes predictions about the stability of behavior over time. In a set of 7 experiments we show that 4- and 5-year-olds understand that agents try to maximize expected utilities, and that these responses cannot be explained by simpler accounts. In particular, these results suggest a modification to the standard belief/desire model of intuitive psychology. Children do not treat beliefs and desires as independent; rather, they recognize that agents have beliefs about their own desires and that this has consequences for the interpretation of agents' actions. (PsycINFO Database Record