Recent empirical work has highlighted the potential role of crosssituational
statistical word learning in children’s early vocabulary
development. In the current study, we tested 5- to 7-year-old children’s
cross-situational learning by presenting children with a series
of ambiguous naming events containing multiple words and
multiple referents. Children rapidly learned word-to-object mappings
by attending to the co-occurrence regularities across these
ambiguous naming events. The current study begins to address
the mechanisms underlying children’s learning by demonstrating
that the diversity of learning contexts affects performance. The
implications of the current findings for the role of cross-situational
word learning at different points in development are discussed
along with the methodological implications of employing schoolaged
children to test hypotheses regarding the mechanisms supporting
early word learning.