We hypothesize that if a learner is able to associate words with the contexts of their use (as children likely are), this could provide a weak source of information for disambiguating minimal pairs even without knowing their exact meanings.
if the learner hears kV 1 t and kV 2 t in different situational contexts, they are likely to be different lexical items (and V 1 and V 2 different phones), despite the lexical similarity between them.