The effect of a tactile-to-visual shift on young children's tendency to map novel labels onto novel objects

When taught a label for an object and then asked whether an exemplar of that object or a novel object is the referent of a novel label, children favor the novel object. Preschool-aged children tend not to show this so-called disambiguation effect, however, when the test objects are presented in a different sense modality than the original object. The current experiments used a touch-to-vision paradigm to test two explanations for this unexpected pattern. Experiment 1 asked whether children might fail to retrieve the original label and found that additional label training benefitted 3-year-olds but not 4-year-olds. Experiments 2 and 3 asked whether children's reaction to discovering the cross-modal match might interfere with how they process the request for the novel label and found that being allowed to share their discovery of the match benefitted 4-year-olds but not 3-year-olds. These findings support the proposal that the chief obstacle to cross-modal disambiguation changes during early childhood from difficulty in retrieving the known label to disruption caused by the discovery of the cross-modal match.