共查询到20条相似文献，搜索用时 15 毫秒
1.
The effects of object orientation and object type on children's interpretation of the word big 总被引：1，自引：0，他引：1
Previous research indicates that preschool children have persistent difficulty interpreting big: 4-5-year-olds typically interpret big to mean tall, and 3-year-olds fail to use any consistent interpretation. We propose that children's interpretation may vary depending on 2 contextual factors: type of object and orientation of object. 40 children (ages 3 and 5) each saw 35 pairs of items and, for each pair, were asked to point to "the big one." Type of object was varied by showing each child 3 kinds of objects: "people," "brownies," and rectangles. Orientation of object was varied by presenting objects either standing perpendicular to the tabletop (vertical condition) or lying flat on the tabletop (horizontal condition). Older children relied on height more consistently than younger children, all subjects relied on area more often in the horizontal condition than in the vertical condition, and 3-year-olds relied on height more when judging the bigness of people than of rectangles matched for size. Taken together, these results demonstrate that contextual factors clearly influence children's responses. These results demonstrate the interplay of cognitive and semantic factors in the process of semantic development. 相似文献
2.
Previous studies of children's understanding of big suggest a curvilinear trend. 3-year-olds, like adults, interpret big as referring to area, while 5-year-olds take big to mean tall. The results of 6 experiments indicate that the curvilinear trend is not obtained in all stimulus contexts. When objects vary extremely, younger and older children take big to mean tall. The object to which big is applied also influences whether height, length, or area is attended to. Moreover, in a production task, adults rarely used the work big to describe the stimuli with which children's understanding of big is typically tested. Taken together, the results suggest that the meaning and use of big is complex and that big may not at any age refer simply to the larger object. It is proposed that the meaning of big is a dynamic system driven by a multiple of perceptual, conceptual, and semantic influences. 相似文献
3.
Six match-to-sample picture/object selection experiments were designed to explore children's knowledge about superordinate words (e.g., "food") and how they acquire this knowledge. Three factors were found to influence the learning and extension of superordinate words in 3- to 5-year-old children (N = 230): The number of standards (one versus two), the type of standards presented (from different basic-level categories versus from the same basic-level category), and the nature of the object representations used (pictures versus objects). A different pattern of superordinate word acquisition was found between 3-year-olds and 4- and 5-year-olds. Although 4- and 5-year-olds could learn and extend novel words to superordinate categories in the presence of two picture exemplars from different categories or a single three-dimensional (3-D) exemplar, 3-year-olds could do so only in the presence of two 3-D exemplars. These findings indicate that young children's acquisition of superordinate words is influenced by multiple factors and that there is a developmental progression from multiple exemplars to single exemplars in superordinate word learning. 相似文献
4.
Four experiments investigated 4-year-olds' understanding of adjective-noun compositionality and their sensitivity to statistics when interpreting scalar adjectives. In Experiments 1 and 2, children selected tall and short items from 9 novel objects called pimwits (1-9 in. in height) or from this array plus 4 taller or shorter distractor objects of the same kind. Changing the height distributions of the sets shifted children's tall and short judgments. However, when distractors differed in name and surface features from targets, in Experiment 3, judgments did not shift. In Experiment 4, dissimilar distractors did affect judgments when they received the same name as targets. It is concluded that 4-year-olds deploy a compositional semantics that is sensitive to statistics and mediated by linguistic labels. 相似文献
5.
To investigate the symbolic quality of preschoolers' gestural representations in the absence of real objects, 48 children (16 3-, 4-, and 5-year-olds) performed 2 tasks. In the first task, they were asked to pretend to use 8 common objects (e.g., "pretend to brush your teeth with a toothbrush"). There was an age-related progression in the symbolic quality of gestural representations. 3- and 4-year-olds used mostly body part gestures (e.g., using an extended finger as the toothbrush), whereas 5-year-olds used imaginary object gestures (e.g., pretending to hold an imaginary toothbrush). To determine if children's symbolic skill is sufficiently flexible to allow them to use gestures other than those spontaneously produced in the first task, in the second task children were asked to imitate, for each object, a gesture modeled by an experimenter. The modeled gesture was different from the one the child performed on the first task (e.g., if the child used a body part gesture to represent a particular object, the experimenter modeled an imaginary object gesture for that object). Ability to imitate modeled gestures was positively related to age but was also influenced by the symbolic mode of gesture. 3-year-olds could not imitate imaginary object gestures as well as body part gestures, suggesting that young preschoolers have difficulty performing symbolic acts that exceed their symbolic level even when the acts are modeled. Results from both tasks provide strong evidence for a developmental progression from concrete body part to more abstract imaginary object gestural representations during the preschool years. 相似文献
6.
Two experiments examined 3- and 4-year-old children's ability to map novel adjectives to object properties. Sixty-four children were introduced to a target (e.g., a bumpy object), and asked to choose between (1) a matching test object (e.g., a different bumpy object), and (2) a contrasting test object (e.g., a smooth object). Four-year-olds successfully extended novel adjectives from the target to the matching test object whether these objects were drawn from the same, or different, basic level categories. In contrast, 3-year-olds' extensions were more restricted. They successfully extended novel adjectives if the target and test objects were drawn from the same basic level category but failed to do so if the objects were drawn from different basic level categories (Experiment 1). However, if 3-year-olds (n = 20) were first permitted to extend a novel adjective to objects within the same basic level category, they were subsequently able to extend that novel adjective broadly to objects from different basic level categories (Experiment 2). Thus, basic level object categories serve as an initial foundation in the process of mapping novel adjectives to object properties. 相似文献
7.
Children's Use of Context in Interpreting "Big" and "Little" 总被引：1，自引：0，他引：1
In order to use the words "big" and "little" appropriately, adults use 3 kinds of contexts: normative (the size of the object is compared to a stored mental representation), perceptual (the object is compared to another physically present object of the same kind), and functional (the object is judged with regard to its intended use). In 3 experiments, we examined how flexibly children switch from one context to another. 2–4-year-olds judged a series of everyday objects as "big" or "little." To answer correctly, children had to judge each object twice, once in a normative context and once in a perceptual or functional context. Results showed that switching from one context to another was not inherently difficult, even for 2-year-olds. However, the direction of switch was important: children throughout the age range tested switched easily from a normative context but made errors when asked to switch to a normative context. We suggest that the normative context differs from the perceptual and functional contexts in that it is unmarked, and that unmarked contexts are accessible only when no other context has been recently experienced. When context is marked more explicitly, children shift flexibly among different meanings. 相似文献
8.
This investigation examined how the nature of the spatial relation influences young children's ability to remember and communicate about nested landmarks. Of particular interest was whether young children are more likely to use a supporting than a proximal landmark to disambiguate identical landmarks (e.g., "it's in the basket on the table" vs. "it's in the basket next to the table"). 3- and 4-year-olds hid objects in a dollhouse and described their locations. Children had to disambiguate the target primary landmark by relating it to a supporting or proximal secondary landmark. Both age groups almost always provided the primary landmark, but 4-year-olds were more likely to provide the secondary landmark than were 3-year-olds. Moreover, children were more successful at providing supporting than proximal secondary landmarks. These results suggest that both referential communication skills and biases in coding location influence children's communication about nested landmarks. 相似文献
9.
2 studies investigated young children's understanding that as the retention interval increases, so do the chances that one will forget. In Study 1 (24 3-year-olds and 24 4-year-olds), 4-year-olds but not 3-year-olds understood that of 2 characters who simultaneously saw an object, the character who waited longer before attempting to find it would not remember where it was. In study 2 (24 3-year-olds and 24 4-year-olds), 4-year-olds but not 3-year-olds understood that of 2 objects seen by a character, the object that was seen a "long long time ago" would be forgotten and the object seen "a little while ago" would be remembered. The findings are discussed in relation to research on young children's understanding of the acquisition, retention, and retrieval of knowledge over time. 相似文献
10.
11.
Developmental differences in part/whole identification 总被引：1，自引：0，他引：1
At issue in the present research was whether or not preschoolers are able to simultaneously perceive multiple aspects of an object. This issue was examined in 2 experiments in which 3-5-year-olds were asked to describe part/whole pictures (e.g., a "house made of crayons"). Prior developmental research has suggested that preschoolers typically fail to name both part and whole aspects of such pictures. In the present study, parts and wholes ranged from relatively "simple" to relatively "difficult" for preschoolers to identify and label. The results showed that even 3-year-olds frequently named both part and whole aspects of our "simple" pictures but were significantly less likely to name both aspects of more "difficult" pictures. Overall, the results suggest that multiple-aspect perception is available as early as 3 years of age, and that preschoolers' failure in previous studies to explicitly identify both part and whole aspects of the same object may reflect failure in verbal or metacognitive skills rather than in children's ability to perceive multiple aspects of an object. 相似文献
12.
D A Baldwin 《Child development》1989,60(6):1291-1306
Young children show considerable interest in color similarity; thus we might expect them to use color as a basis for generalizing object labels. However, natural language observations suggest they do not: children tend to overextend labels based on form similarity and rarely, if ever, overextend labels to objects that share only color. Perhaps, then, children give form priority over color in their expectations about object-label reference. This hypothesis was investigated in 2 studies. In a first study, 40 2- and 3-year-olds sorted 10 sets of 3 pictures that contrasted form with color. Children participated in 1 of 2 conditions: half of the children were shown a target object and asked to "find another one" from among the two choice objects, while the other children heard a novel label for the target (e.g., "See this zom?") and were asked to extend the label (e.g., "Can you find another zom?"). 3-year-olds sorted almost exclusively on the basis of form in both conditions, while 2-year-olds performed differently in the 2 conditions: they frequently chose the color match when labels were absent, but selected by form rather than color when asked to extend a novel label. A second study replicated these findings with novel objects that were real rather than pictured. This study also suggested that 3-year-olds grant color some role in their decisions about object-label reference as long as form differences are reduced to a tolerable level. In sum, young children expect form to be more important than color for guiding object-label reference, even though they may find color interesting when not asked to extend labels. This expectation helps explain the speed and relative ease with which children acquire object labels. 相似文献
13.
4 experiments investigated the development of children's ability to recognize perceptual relational commonalities such as symmetry or monotonicity. In Experiment 1, 6- and 8-year-olds were able to recognize higher-order relational similarity across different dimensions (e.g., size/saturation ) and across different polarities (e.g., increase/decrease ), whereas 4-year-olds could recognize higher-order relational matches only when they were supported by lower-order commonalities (e.g., size/size but not size/saturation matches). Further experiments tested how the processes of comparison and categorization affected 4-year-olds' ability to recognize relational similarity. The results of the experiments supported the hypothesis that comparison and categorization processes lead to changes in children's representations of relational structure, enabling them to recognize more abstract commonalities. A computational model lent further support to the claims. 相似文献
14.
Children tend to extend object names on the basis of sameness of shape, rather than size, color, or material-a tendency that has been dubbed the "shape bias." Is the shape bias the result of well-learned associations between words and objects? Or does it exist because of a general belief that shape is a good indicator of object category membership? The present three studies addressed this debate by exploring whether the shape bias is specific to naming. In Study 1, 3-year-olds showed the shape bias both when asked to extend a novel name and when asked to select an object of the same kind as a target object. Study 2 found the same shape bias when children were asked to generalize properties relevant to category membership. Study 3 replicated the findings from Study 1 with 2-year-olds. These findings suggest that the shape bias derives from children's beliefs about object kinds and is not the product of associative learning. 相似文献
15.
On Wooden Pillows: Multiple Classification and Children''s Category-based Inductions 总被引：6，自引：0，他引：6
Previous research has indicated that preschoolers do not distinguish between properties that are generalizable within a given category and those that are not. 2 possible general constraints on children's cognition are proposed to account for these findings. 3 studies are reported that argue against the presence of such general constraints. We examine preschoolers' understanding of the properties associated with material (e.g., wood, cotton) and object (e.g., chair, pillow) categories. In Study 1, subjects consistently made inductions based on the material compositions of items when asked to predict texture and fragility. In Study 2, the same subjects judged that items that shared material would share an unfamiliar dispositional property (e.g., gets sodden in water), but items that shared object kind would share a novel functional property (e.g., used for accelerating). Study 3 tested a younger sample of 3-year-olds and found the same sensitivity to category type, albeit with larger individual differences. By age 3, children use different modes of categorization to generalize different kinds of phenomena. These results argue against general limitations on children's abilities to use categories to make inductions. Even when children lack specific theoretical knowledge, the ability to organize phenomena into domains allows children to recognize which categories are relevant in different situations. This understanding can provide a basis for the development of more specific theories. 相似文献
16.
Three studies assessed the ability of 2-year-olds to use semantic context to infer the meanings of novel nouns and to retain those meanings a day later. In the first experiment, 24 2-year-olds heard novel nouns in sentences that contained semantically constraining verbs (e.g., "Mommy feeds the ferret"). They chose from a set of four novel object pictures to indicate the referent. Children learned a majority of the novel words. However, they occasionally failed to choose the correct object even when they understood the verb. Experiment 2 examined whether this was due to an inability to identify some of the pictures of novel objects. Experiment 3 tested 24 2-year-olds' memory for the newly learned nouns following a 24 hr delay and found significant retention. Results are discussed in terms of learning mechanisms that facilitate vocabulary acquisition in young children. 相似文献
17.
In Study 1, English-speaking 3- and 4-year-olds heard a novel adjective used to label one of two objects and were asked for the referent of a different novel adjective. Children were more likely to select the unlabeled object if the two adjectives appeared prenominally (e.g., "a very DAXY dog") than as predicates (e.g., "a dog that is very DAXY"). Study 2 revealed that this response occurred only when both adjectives were prenominal. Study 3 replicated Study 1 with Hebrew-speaking 3- and 4-year-olds, even though in Hebrew both types of adjectives appear postnominally. Preschoolers understand that prenominal adjectives imply a restriction of the reference of nouns, and this knowledge motivates a contrastive pragmatic inference regarding the referents of different prenominal adjectives. 相似文献
18.
Real physical objects (e.g., a chair) can be distinguished from mental entities (e.g., a thought about a chair) on the basis of a number of criteria. 3 of these are behavioral-sensory evidence--whether the entity can be seen, touched, and physically acted upon; public existence--whether other persons experience the entity; and consistent existence--whether the entity consistently exists over time. Two studies tested 3-5-year-old children's ability to distinguish real versus mental entities on the basis of these criteria and to categorize such entities suitably. Even 3-year-olds were able to judge real and mental entities appropriately on the basis of the 3 criteria, to sort such entities as explicitly real and not-real, and to provide cogent explanations of their choices as well. A further distinction between real and mental entities is that mental entities can be about physically impossible, nonexistent things (e.g., a dog that flies). A third study demonstrated that 3-5-year-olds also appreciated this distinction. Taken together, these results contradict a common characterization of the young child as unaware of the fundamental ontological distinction between the internal mental world and objective reality. The implications of these findings are discussed for 3 other bodies of research: Piaget's characterization of young children as realists, Keil's theory of ontological development, and recent research on children's understanding of the mind. 相似文献
19.
3 experiments are reported, all of which show the crucial importance of the "half" boundary in children's proportional judgments. In the first experiment 4-, 5-, 6-, and 7-year-old children had to judge which of 2 boxes of blue and white bricks was represented in a small picture. The proportion of blue to white bricks was different in the 2 boxes, and the question was whether the children could use these proportions to make their choices. The 6- and 7-year-old children solved the problem much more successfully when the proportions crossed the "half" boundary (e.g., 3/8 blue vs. 5/8 blue). The second experiment showed that discriminations involving half (e.g., 1/2 blue vs. 1/4 blue) are also easier than those that do not cross the "half" boundary for the 6- and 7-year-olds. The third experiment confirmed the results of the first 2 with pictures of different absolute sizes from each other. We conclude that "half" plays a crucial role in children's early proportional reasoning, and that the "half" boundary is to some extent similar to, though not as powerful as, the category boundaries discovered in speech perception. 相似文献
20.
We examined the role of object kind familiarity (i.e., knowledge of a count noun for an object) on preschoolers' sensitivity to the relation between a novel word's form class (adjective or count noun) and its reference (to a material kind-property or to an object kind). We used a forced-choice match-to-target task, in which children learned a word for one object (e.g., a metal cup), and then chose between 2 other objects. One was from the same object kind but a different material kind (with different related properties, such as color and texture; e.g., a white plastic cup); the other was from a different object kind but the same material kind (with the same related properties; e.g., a metal spoon). In Experiment 1, children learned either a count noun (e.g., "This is a zav") or an adjective (e.g., "This is a zav one"). Within each form class, we crossed the familiarity of the referent object kind (familiar and unfamiliar) with the age of the children (2- and 4-year-olds). The principal finding was that in interpreting an adjective, 4-year-olds were more likely to choose the object sharing material kind with the target if the target was familiar than if it was unfamiliar. No such familiarity effect was evident among 2-year-olds. In Experiment 2, we employed a more unambiguously adjectival frame (e.g., "This is a very zav-ish one"), and replicated the results of Experiment 1. We interpret the results in terms of 2 proposed word learning biases: one that learners initially expect any word applied to an unfamiliar object to refer to a (basic-level) kind of object, and a second that learners prefer words to contrast in meaning. We consider several interpretations of the observed age difference. 相似文献