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Children begin to comprehend words at 9 months. They say their first word at around 12 months. The pace with which children add new words to receptive and productive vocabulary then accelerates such that by 24 to 30 months, children add words at the staggering rate of 5 to 9 new words a day (Bloom, 2000). Just as in many other cognitive learning tasks, a critical problem in word learning is the uncertainty and ambiguity in the learning environment–young word learners need to discover correct word-referent mappings among many possible candidate words and many possible candidate referents from potentially many objects that are simultaneously available. For example, Quine (1960) famously presented the core problem for learning word meanings from their co-occurrence with perceived events in the world. He imagined an anthropologist who observes a speaker saying “gavagai” while pointing in the general direction of a field. The intended referent (rabbit, grass, the field, or rabbit ears, etc.) is indeterminate from this example. Past work has shown that the social context plays a key role in young learners’ prowess in disambiguating cluttered learning situations. The literature provides many powerful demonstrations of how social-interactional cues guide infants’ word learning, and in many cases, these seem essential to successful learning (Baldwin, 1993; Tomasello and Akhtar, 1995; Woodward and Guajardo, 2002; Bloom, 2000). Often the importance of social cues is interpreted in terms of children’s understanding that words are used with an “intent to refer.” Thus children’s early dependence on social cues is seen as a diagnostic …