The Effect of Vocabulary Size on Toddlers’ Receptiveness to Unexpected Testimony About Category Membership

Children must be willing to accept some of what they hear “on faith,” even when that testimony conflicts with their own expectations. The study reported here investigated the relation among vocabulary size, object recognition, and 24-month-olds’ (N = 40) willingness to accept potentially surprising testimony about the category to which an object belongs. Results showed that children with larger vocabularies were better able to recognize atypical exemplars of familiar categories than children with smaller vocabularies. However, they were also most likely to accept unexpected testimony that an object that looked like a member of one familiar category was actually a member of another. These results indicate that 24-month-olds trust classifications provided by adult labeling patterns even when they conflict with the classifications children generate on their own.