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1.
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
2.
4 studies investigate how differential input affects preschoolers' abilities to learn novel color words. 3-, 4-, and 5-year-old children saw objects in novel shapes and colors and heard a novel color label for the object. Labels were presented through ostensive definition (e.g., "See, it's mauve"), corrective linguistic contrast (e.g., "See, it's not purple; it's mauve"), or an inclusion statement (e.g., "See, it's mauve; it's a kind of purple"). 4- and 5-year-old children interpreted the novel word as a shape term when ostensive information was provided but as a color term when additional information, either contrastive or inclusive, specified a relation between the novel term and a known label for that color. Furthermore, children who consistently interpreted the novel word as a color word tended to treat the novel and known labels as mutually exclusive color terms if they heard contrastive information, whereas they tended to treat the words as hierarchically related if they heard inclusion information. 3-year-olds generally did not make use of either type of information in determining the semantic domain of the novel word or the relation between terms. 相似文献
3.
We demonstrate that lexical form class information can play a powerful role in directing the establishment of word-to-object mappings in referentially ambiguous situations. A total of 144 3- and 4-year-olds heard a novel label, modeled syntactically as either a proper name or an adjective, for a stuffed animal of a familiar kind. We then added a second object of the same kind and asked children (1) to choose one of the two objects as the referent of a second novel label, also presented syntactically as either a proper name or an adjective, and (2) to decide whether this second label could also apply to the object they did not choose. In each of three experiments, preschoolers were most likely to reject two words for the same object if both words were proper names (as if one dog could not be both "Fido" and "Rover"). They were significantly less likely to do so if both were adjectives (as if one dog could be both "spotted" and "furry") or if one was a proper name and the other was an adjective (as if one dog could be both "Fido" and "furry"). Information about lexical form class thus contributed significantly to the formation of linkages between words and objects. 相似文献
4.
Young children often fail to generalize a novel verb based on sameness of action since they have difficulty focusing on the relational similarity across events while at the same time ignoring the objects that are involved. Study 1, with Japanese-speaking 3- and 4-year-olds (N = 28 in each group), found that similarity of objects involved in action events plays a scaffolding role in children's extraction of relational similarity across events when they extend a verb. Study 2, with 4-year-olds (N = 47), further showed that repeated experience of action-based verb extension supported by object similarity leads children to be better able to extend a novel verb based on sameness of action, even without support from object similarity. 相似文献
5.
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
6.
A core task in language acquisition is mapping words onto objects, actions, and events. Two studies investigated how children learn to map novel labels onto novel objects. Study 1 investigated whether 10-month-olds use both perceptual and social cues to learn a word. Study 2, a control study, tested whether infants paired the label with a particular spatial location rather than to an object. Results show that 10-month-olds can learn new labels and do so by relying on the perceptual salience of an object instead of social cues provided by a speaker. This is in direct contrast to the way in which older children (12-, 18-, and 24-month-olds) learn and extend new object names. 相似文献
7.
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
8.
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
9.
Young children's inductions from natural kinds: the role of categories and appearances 总被引：8，自引：1，他引：8
Recent analyses of natural kind terms (e.g., dog, gold) suggest that people expect members of a kind to share unforeseen properties. The present study investigated the development of this expectation by studying children's inductive inferences. On each of a series of problems, 3- and 4-year-old children were taught a new fact about an object and then were asked whether it would generalize to: an object that looked like the original, that had the same label as the original, that looked like the original and had the same label, or that differed from the original in both respects. The results indicate that 3- and 4-year-olds drew more inferences based on category membership than on perceptual appearances, when both were available. Furthermore, children often based their inferences on category membership even when no label was provided. Thus even 3-year-olds assumed that natural kind categories include more than superficial features. 相似文献
10.
Children's Understanding of Knowledge Acquisition: The Tendency for Children to Report That They Have Always Known What They Have Just Learned 总被引：1，自引：0，他引：1
Children's attention to knowledge-acquisition events was examined in 4 experiments in which children were taught novel facts and subsequently asked how long they had known the new information. In Experiment 1, 4- and 5-year-olds tended to claim they had known novel animal facts for a long time and also reported that other children would know the novel facts. This finding was replicated in Experiment 2, using facts associated with chemistry demonstrations. In Experiments 3 and 4, children were taught new color words. 5-year-olds, but not 4-year-olds, distinguished between novel and familiar color words, reporting they had not known the novel words before the test session, but they had always known the familiar words. 4-year-olds in Experiment 4 were better able to distinguish novel and familiar color words when the teaching of the novel words was an explicit and salient part of the procedure. 相似文献
11.
Young children appear to know when a novel label for a novel object is a common noun. The present study was concerned with the properties of a named object that children assume to be true of other members of the category that is specified by such a noun. Preschoolers, second graders, and college students were shown drawings of objects and given nonsense labels for those objects. They then viewed other objects that varied from the labeled ones along 4 particular attributes and were asked to decide if those other objects should also receive the same label. Preschoolers focused mostly on single attributes in making category decisions, and their choices of attributes were evenly distributed among the 4 types. Older individuals primarily exhibited multiple attribute rules. The results are discussed in terms of developmental differences in the modes of processing that are used and in the types of knowledge that are brought to bear on the word learning situation. 相似文献
12.
William E. Merriman John M. Marazita Lorna H. Jarvis Julie A. Evey-Burkey Michael Biggins 《Child development》1995,66(6):1890-1908
A new word-learning phenomenon is demonstrated and a new word-learning principle is proposed to account for it. In Study 1, 60 3-year-olds were shown a pair of objects and heard a novel label used repeatedly for one, but not for the other. In a forced-choice test of generalization of the label, the latter object was selected less often by the children than one that had not been present during training. This so-called Nominal Passover Effect was the same whether the speaker had completely ignored the comparison object during training or had referred to it with pronouns. The performance of a no-word control group ( N = 24) indicated that the effect was not due to a preference for the less exposed of the two choice objects. The effect is consistent with the Exhaustive Reference Principle, which stipulates that whenever a new generic word is used to name something, expect it to be extended to all entities in a situation that the speaker perceives and believes to be exemplars of the name. In Study 2 ( N = 48), the Nominal Passover Effect was replicated with 3 new sets of objects and with training language that contained only indefinite forms of reference. The passover experience was often sufficient to counteract children's tendency to generalize a novel label on the basis of perceptual similarity. The passover effect was not evident in free-choice name generalization tests in either study. 相似文献
13.
Object Properties and Knowledge in Early Lexical Learning 总被引：2，自引：0，他引：2
The ease with which young children learn object nouns suggests that they possess strategies to identify properties critical to lexical category membership. In previous work, young children used a same-shape criterion to extend new count nouns. The present research tested the generality of this shape bias. 2- and 3-year-olds were asked either to extend a novel count noun to new instances, or to choose unnamed objects to go together. The objects varied in shape, size, and texture. For half of the subjects, the objects had eyes--a property strongly associated with certain material kinds. If young children know this association, they should attend to texture as well as shape in classifying objects with eyes. With named objects only, both 2- and 3-year-old children classified eyeless objects by shape and objects with eyes by both shape and texture. The results suggest that very young children possess considerable knowledge about conditional relations between kinds of perceptual properties. Knowledge of such conditional relations may aid children in forming new categories and thus in discovering new word meanings. 相似文献
14.
Two studies explored 3- and 4-year-olds' (N = 60) understanding that the five senses can each lead to different types of knowledge. In Study 1, 40 children engaged in five scenarios in which they could only perform one sensory action to identify the property of an object (e.g., color, scent). After performing the action, children were asked how they found out the property and to show the experimenter how they had found it out. Using a Mr. Potato Head doll, children were also asked to indicate the sensory organ the doll would need to use to identify the property. In Study 2, 20 children presented with five Mr. Potato Head dolls, each sporting only one sensory organ (e.g., a nose), were asked which Mr. Potato Head could find out the property in question. The 3-year-olds performed significantly poorer than the 4-year-olds on all tasks, suggesting a marked transition in children's ability to recognize the origin of their modality-specific knowledge during the time period between 3 and 4 years of age. 相似文献
15.
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
16.
The Development of Verb Concepts: Children''s Use of Verbs to Label Familiar and Novel Events 总被引：1，自引：0，他引：1
Douglas A. Behrend 《Child development》1990,61(3):681-696
The importance of actions, results, and instruments in verb concepts was examined in four studies. Study 1 investigated how children label familiar events for which instrument, action, and result verbs were appropriate labels. In Study 2, subjects were taught novel verbs and were asked to use these verbs to label events in which the instrument, action, or result had been changed. Study 1 showed that 3-year-olds used action verbs more frequently than older children and adults, and that they preferred to use an action verb over a result verb when both verbs were appropriate labels. Instrument verbs were used most frequently as first responses to the events, and were most frequently used by older children and adults. In Study 2, subjects were least likely to use the novel verbs to label events in which the result had changed. This effect increased with age. Action changes had a moderate effect for all age groups, while instrument changes had the weakest effect. Studies 3 and 4 ruled out stimulus salience and a familiar word strategy as interpretations of these findings. The studies are discussed in terms of current theory and research on conceptual development, word-learning strategies, and the semantic organization of nouns and verbs. 相似文献
17.
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
18.
Children's confidence in their own knowledge may influence their willingness to learn novel information from others. Twenty-four-month-old children's (N = 160) willingness to learn novel labels for either familiar or novel objects from an adult speaker was tested in 1 of 5 conditions: accurate, inaccurate, knowledgeable, ignorant, or uninformative. Children were willing to learn a second label for an object from a reliable informant in the accurate, knowledgeable, and uninformative conditions; children were less willing to apply a novel label to a familiar object if the speaker previously was inaccurate or had expressed ignorance. However, when the objects were novel, children were willing to learn the label regardless of the speaker's knowledge level. 相似文献
19.
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
20.
The contribution of intentionality understanding to symbolic development was examined. Actors added colored dots to a map, displaying either symbolic or aesthetic intentions. In Study 1, most children (5–6 years) understood actors' intentions, but when asked which graphic would help find hidden objects, most selected the incorrect (aesthetic) one whose dot color matched referent color. On a similar task in Study 2, 5- and 6-year-olds systematically picked incorrectly, 9- and 10-year-olds picked correctly, and 7- and 8-year-olds showed mixed performance. When referent color matched neither symbolic nor aesthetic dot colors, children performed better overall, but only the oldest children universally selected the correct graphic and justified choices with intentionality. Results bear on theory of mind, symbolic understanding, and map understanding. 相似文献