Whose DAM account? Attentional learning explains Booth and Waxman

Booth and Waxman (Cognition 84 (2002) B11) have recently shown that linguistic cues to animacy affect childrenʹs novel name extensions. They argue that this demonstration contradicts two central tenets of our attentional learning account of object naming, which Booth and Waxman characterize as the “dumb attentional mechanism” or “DAM” account. In the present article, we show that the first of these tenets has never been a feature of the attentional learning account, and that the second tenet, which is central to our account, is not addressed by Booth and Waxmanʹs findings. We suggest that the debate about the nature of childrenʹs language and cognition would profit from an increased awareness of the different levels of analysis at which different researchers are working.