Shape, material, and syntax: Interacting forces in children's learning in novel words for objects and substances

In three studies, we examined the roles of ontological and syntactic information in children's learning of words for physical entities, such as objects and substances. In Experiment 1, 3-year-olds and 4- to 5-year-olds, and adults first saw either an Object or Substance Standard labelled with either a mass or a count noun. Transfer items varied in shape and/or material as compared to the Standards. The 3-year-olds attended to ontologically relevant information about the Standard (i.e. its object/substance status), whereas 4- to 5-year-olds and adults used the syntactic context that marked the label as a mass or count noun. However, the tendency for 4- to 5-year olds to use the syntactic context when they heard a label (mass or count) was less pronounced when the Standards were more ambiguous (Experiment 2). In Experiment 3, 3-year-olds who were shown the Object or Substance Standard in a No-Name similarity judgement task, attended to shape for both Standard types. This contrasts with the findings from Exp...

[1]  Linda B. Smith,et al.  The importance of shape in early lexical learning , 1988 .

[2]  Dare A. Baldwin,et al.  Clarifying the role of shape in children's taxonomic assumption. , 1992, Journal of experimental child psychology.

[3]  E. Markman,et al.  Children's sensitivity to constraints on word meaning: Taxonomic versus thematic relations , 1984, Cognitive Psychology.

[4]  Roger S. Brown,et al.  Linguistic determinism and the part of speech. , 1957, Journal of abnormal psychology.

[5]  D. Hall.  Naming Solids and Nonsolids: Children's Default Construals. , 1996 .

[6]  V. Gathercole,et al.  ‘He has too much hard questions’: the acquisition of the linguistic mass–count distinction in much and many , 1985, Journal of Child Language.

[7]  Barbara Landau,et al.  Count nouns, adjectives, and perceptual properties in children's novel word interpretations. , 1992 .

[8]  Terry Kit-fong Au,et al.  Acquiring word meanings via linguistic contrast , 1987 .

[9]  R. Gelman,et al.  Preschooler's Ability to Decide Whether a Photographed Unfamiliar Object Can Move Itself. , 1988 .

[10]  David K. Dickinson.  Learning names for materials: Factors constraining and limiting hypotheses about word meaning ☆ , 1988 .

[11]  Lila R. Gleitman,et al.  What is a language made out of , 1997 .

[12]  P. Bloom,et al.  Possible names: The role of syntax-semantics mappings in the acquisition of nominals , 1994 .

[13]  S. Pinker.  How could a child use verb syntax to learn verb semantics , 1994 .

[14]  Sandra R. Waxman,et al.  Linguistic biases and the establishment of conceptual hierarchies: Evidence from preschool children , 1990 .

[15]  J. F. Macario,et al.  Young children's use of color in classification: Foods and canonically colored objects , 1991 .

[16]  John Macnamara,et al.  What's in a name? A study of how children learn common and proper names. , 1974 .

[17]  Sandra R. Waxman,et al.  Words as Invitations to Form Categories: Evidence from 12- to 13-Month-Old Infants , 1995, Cognitive Psychology.

[18]  Elizabeth F. Shipley,et al.  Mothers' use of superordinate category terms , 1983, Journal of Child Language.

[19]  Linda B. Smith,et al.  Syntactic context and the shape bias in children's and adults' lexical learning , 1992 .

[20]  E. Spelke,et al.  Ontological categories guide young children's inductions of word meaning: Object terms and substance terms , 1991, Cognition.

[21]  S Ullman,et al.  Rigidity and Misperceived Motion , 1984, Perception.

[22]  D. Gentner,et al.  A cross-linguistic study of early word meaning: universal ontology and linguistic influence , 1997, Cognition.

[23]  N. Soja.  Inferences about the meanings of nouns: The relationship between perception and syntax , 1992 .

[24]  S. Gelman,et al.  How two-year-old children interpret proper and common names for unfamiliar objects. , 1984, Child development.

[25]  E. Markman,et al.  When it is better to receive than to give: Syntactic and conceptual constraints on vocabulary growth , 1994 .

[26]  Donald D. Hoffman,et al.  Parts of recognition , 1984, Cognition.

[27]  S. Carey.  Does learning a language require the child to reconceptualize the world , 1994 .

[28]  S. Prasada.  Learning names for solid substances: Quantifying solid entities in terms of portions ☆ , 1993 .

[29]  P. Gordon.  Evaluating the semantic categories hypothesis: The case of the count/mass distinction , 1985, Cognition.