Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Children and adults can use cross-situational information toidentify words’ referents. What do learners retain about thepotential referents that occur with a word: do they encodemultiple referents or a single guess? We tested this questionusing novel mouse tracking and finger tracking paradigms.Adults were exposed to novel words in a series of ambiguoustraining trials and then tested on the words’ referents. In sometest trials, participants saw the target and three referents thathad never occurred with the word; other test trials included ahigh-probability competitor that had repeatedly occurred withthe word. Participants’ mouse movements were slower, lessaccurate, and took a more complex path to the selectedreferent when the competitor was present, indicating thatparticipants were aware that both the target and competitorhad previously occurred with the word. This suggests thatlearners can accrue information about multiple potentialreferents for a word, and that mouse tracking provides apromising way of assessing this knowledge. However, thisknowledge was not evident in participants’ finger movements,suggesting that the dynamics of finger movements might notcapture real-time competition between referents.