Mutual Exlcusivity Diagrams

Lately, I've been reading about experiments on Mutual Exclusivity. I've found it useful to draw up some diagrams to illustrate each. I've posted some of them below. Each diagram represents entities in the Singal, Concept and Environment domains. Circles represent entities (signals, concepts or actual objects). Lines between circles represent a link between them. For instance the word "Dog" would be linked with a concept "Dog" which could be linked to an actual instantiation of a dog in the environment (as long as the observer had learnt these). Dotted circles indicate a novel entity which the observer has not seen before. Dashed lines indicate links trained by the experimenter.

Au & Glusman (1990):
Byers-Heinlein & Werker (2009):

Jaswal & Hansen (2006):


Grassman & Tomasello (2010) - a reaction to Jaswal & Hansen above:

Healey & Scarabela (2009):


Au TK, & Glusman M (1990). The principle of mutual exclusivity in word learning: to honor or not to honor? Child development, 61 (5), 1474-90 PMID: 2245739

Byers-Heinlein, K., & Werker, J. (2009). Monolingual, bilingual, trilingual: infants' language experience influences the development of a word-learning heuristic Developmental Science, 12 (5), 815-823 DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-7687.2009.00902.x

Jaswal VK, & Hansen MB (2006). Learning words: children disregard some pragmatic information that conflicts with mutual exclusivity. Developmental science, 9 (2), 158-65 PMID: 16472316

Grassmann, S., & Tomasello, M. (2010). Young children follow pointing over words in interpreting acts of reference Developmental Science, 13 (1), 252-263 DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-7687.2009.00871.x

Healey, E. and Scarabela, B. (2009). Are children willing to accept two labels for one object? Proceedings of the Child Language Seminar. University of Reading.