Children's sensitivity to constraints on word meaning: Taxonomic versus thematic relations (original) (raw)
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Constraints children place on word meanings
Cognitive Science, 1990
This paper views lexical acquisition as a problem of induction: Children must figure out the meaning of a given term. given the large number of possible meanings any term could have. If children had to consider. evaluate. and rule out an unlimited number af hypotheses about each word in order to figure out its meaning. learning word meanings would be hopeless. Children must. therefore. be limited in the kinds of hypotheses they consider as possible word meanings. This paper considers three possible constraints on word meanings: (1) The whole object assumption which leads children to interpret novel terms as labels for objects-not ports. substances. or other properties of objects; (2) The taxonomic assumption which leads children to consider labels as referring to objects of like kind. rather than to objects that are thematically related; and (3) The mutual exclusivity assumption which leads children to expect each object to have only one label. Some of the evidence for these constraints is reviewed. This paper is based on a talk given in the symposium Structural Constraints on Cognitive Development, Psychonomics, 1986 and borrows heavily from Markman (in press).
Developmental Psychology, 1995
If young children approached the task of word learning with a specific hypothesis about the meaning of novel count nouns, they could make the problem of word learning more tractable. Six experiments were conducted to test children's hypotheses about how labels map to object categories. Findings indicated that (a) 3-and 4-year-olds function with an antithematic bias; (b) children do not reliably extend novel nouns to superordinate exemplars when perceptual similarity is controlled until approximately age 7; and (c) children expect novel nouns to label taxonomic categories at the basic level, even in the presence of a perceptually compelling distractor. Results are interpreted as supporting the principle of categorical scope (R. M. Golinkoff, C. B. Mervis, & K. Hirsh-Pasek, 1994).
Nouns Mark Category Relations: Toddlers' and Preschoolers' Word-Learning Biases
Child Development, 1990
Recent research suggests that preschool children approach the task of word leaming equipped with implicit biases that lead them to prefer some possible meanings over others. The noun-category bias proposes that children favor category relations when interpreting the meaning of novel nouns. In the series of experiments reported here, we develop a stringent test of the noun-category bias and reveal that it is present in children as young as 2 years of age. In each experiment, children participated in a 5-item match-to-sample task. Children were presented with a target item (e.g., a cow) and 4 choices, 2 of which belonged to the same superordinate category as the target (e.g., a fox and a zebra) and 2 of which were thematically related to the target (e.g., milk and a bam). In Experiment 1 we demonstrate that novel nouns prompt preschool children to attend to superordinate-level category relations, even in the presence of multiple thematic alternatives. In Experiment 2, we ascertain that the bias is specific to nouns; novel adjectives do not highlight superordinate category relations. In Experiment 3, we demonstrate the noun-category bias in 2-year-olds. The nature and utility of the noun-category bias are discussed.
Preschool children’s use of cues to generic meaning
Cognition, 2008
Sentences that refer to categories-generic sentences (e.g., ''Dogs are friendly'')-are frequent in speech addressed to young children and constitute an important means of knowledge transmission. However, detecting generic meaning may be challenging for young children, since it requires attention to a multitude of morphosyntactic, semantic, and pragmatic cues. The first three experiments tested whether 3-and 4-year-olds use (a) the immediate linguistic context, (b) their previous knowledge, and (c) the social context to determine whether an utterance with ambiguous scope (e.g., ''They are afraid of mice'', spoken while pointing to 2 birds) is generic. Four-year-olds were able to take advantage of all the cues provided, but 3-year-olds were sensitive only to the first two. In Experiment 4, we tested the relative strength of linguistic-context cues and previous-knowledge cues by putting them in conflict; in this task, 4-yearolds, but not 3-year-olds, preferred to base their interpretations on the explicit noun phrase cues from the linguistic context. These studies indicate that, from early on, children can use
"Slow Mapping" in Children's Learning of Semantic Relations
Proceedings of the Annual Conference of the Cognitive …
To investigate how young children learn categorical semantic relations between words, 4- to 7-year-olds were taught four labels for novel categories in an “alien” microworld. After two play sessions, where each label was given, with defining information, at least 20 times, comprehension and production were tested. Results of two experiments show that 6-7-year- olds learned more words and correct semantic relations than 4-5-year-olds. The exclusion relation between contrasting category labels was easy to learn, and some findings suggested that hierarchical words are more easily learned than overlapping ones. Both studies showed no advantage to explicitly telling children semantic relations between words (e.g., “All fegs are wuddles.”). The results qualify a common assumption that preschool children have precocious abilities to infer word meaning; such an ability does not seem to extend to semantic relations between words.
Learning language from within: Children use semantic generalizations to infer word meanings
Cognition, 2017
One reason that word learning presents a challenge for children is because pairings between word forms and meanings are arbitrary conventions that children must learn via observation - e.g., the fact that "shovel" labels shovels. The present studies explore cases in which children might bypass observational learning and spontaneously infer new word meanings: By exploiting the fact that many words are flexible and systematically encode multiple, related meanings. For example, words like shovel and hammer are nouns for instruments, and verbs for activities involving those instruments. The present studies explored whether 3- to 5-year-old children possess semantic generalizations about lexical flexibility, and can use these generalizations to infer new word meanings: Upon learning that dax labels an activity involving an instrument, do children spontaneously infer that dax can also label the instrument itself? Across four studies, we show that at least by age four, children s...
How Two- and Four-Year-Old Children Interpret Adjectives and Count Nouns
Child Development, 1993
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.