From the lexicon to expectations about kinds: a role for associative learning

In the novel noun generalization task, 2 1/2-year-old children display generalized expectations about how solid and nonsolid things are named, extending names for never-before-encountered solids by shape and for never-before-encountered nonsolids by material. This distinction between solids and nonsolids has been interpreted in terms of an ontological distinction between objects and substances. Nine simulations and behavioral experiments tested the hypothesis that these expectations arise from the correlations characterizing early learned noun categories. In the simulation studies, connectionist networks were trained on noun vocabularies modeled after those of children. These networks formed generalized expectations about solids and nonsolids that match children's performances in the novel noun generalization task in the very different languages of English and Japanese. The simulations also generate new predictions supported by new experiments with children. Implications are discussed in terms of children's development of distinctions between kinds of categories and in terms of the nature of this knowledge.     

Object name learning provides on-the-job training for attention

By the age of 3, children easily learn to name new objects, extending new names for unfamiliar objects by similarity in shape. Two experiments tested the proposal that experience in learning object names tunes children's attention to the properties relevant for naming—in the present case, to the property of shape—and thus facilitates the learning of more object names. In Experiment 1, a 9-week longitudinal study, 17-month-old children who repeatedly played with and heard names for members of unfamiliar object categories well organized by shape formed the generalization that only objects with similar shapes have the same name. Trained children also showed a dramatic increase in acquisition of new object names outside of the laboratory during the course of the study. Experiment 2 replicated these findings and showed that they depended on children's learning both a coherent category structure and object names. Thus, children who learn specific names for specific things in categories with a common organizing property—in this case, shape—also learn to attend to just the right property—in this case, shape—for learning more object names.     

Statistical regularities in vocabulary guide language acquisition in connectionist models and 15-20-month-olds

This research tested the hypothesis that young children's bias to generalize names for solid objects by shape is the product of statistical regularities among nouns in the early productive vocabulary. Data from a 4-layer Hopfield network suggested that the statistical regularities in the early noun vocabulary are strong enough to create a shape bias, and that the shape bias is overgeneralized to nonsolid stimuli. A 2nd simulation suggested that this overgeneralization is due to the dominance of names for shape-based categories in the early noun vocabulary. Two subsequent longitudinal experiments tested whether it is possible to create word learning biases in children. Children 15-20 months old were given intensive naming experiences with 12 noun categories typical of the types of categories children learn to name early. The children developed a precocious shape bias that was overgeneralized to naming nonsolid substances; they also showed accelerated vocabulary development. Children taught an atypical set of nouns or no new nouns did not develop a shape bias and did not show accelerated vocabulary development.     

Exploring noun bias in Filipino-English bilingual children

Researchers have suggested that there is a noun bias in children's early vocabularies brought about by features of adults' child-directed utterances, which may vary across languages (E. V. Bates et al., 1994; D. Gentner, 1982). In the present study, the authors explored noun bias in 60 Filipino-English bilingual children whose 2 languages differed in how they emphasized nouns and verbs in typical syntactic forms. The results revealed a noun bias, but only in the bilingual children's English vocabulary. The noun bias in English was associated with the frequency of nouns in the caregivers' utterances and the proportion of nouns in the initial positions of the caregivers' utterances. The authors also found different associations between salient positions in the adult utterances and children's vocabularies in English and Filipino.     

They call it like they see it: spontaneous naming and attention to shape

Two experiments explore children's spontaneous labeling of novel objects as a method to study early lexical access. The experiments also provide new evidence on children's attention to object shape when labeling objects. In Experiment 1, the spontaneous productions of 21 23- to 28-month-olds (mean 26;28) shown a set of novel, unnamed objects were analyzed both in terms of the specific words said and, via adult judgments, their likely perceptual basis. We found that children's spontaneous names were cued by the perceptual feature of shape. Experiment 2 examines the relation between spontaneous productions, name generalizations in a structured task, and vocabulary development in a group of children between 17 and 24 months of age (mean 21;6). Results indicate that object shape plays an important role in both spontaneous productions and novel noun generalization, but contrary to current hypotheses, children may name objects by shape from the earliest points of productive vocabulary development and this tendency may not be lexically specific.     

It's Taking Shape: Shared Object Features Influence Novel Noun Generalizations

Children's early noun vocabularies are dominated by names for shape‐based categories. However, along with shape, material and colour are also important features of many early categories. In the current study, we investigate how the number of shared features among objects influences children's novel noun generalizations, explanations for these generalizations and spontaneous speech. Preschool children and adults were presented with test objects that shared only one feature (e.g. shape) or that shared two features (e.g. material and colour). After each trial, participants were asked, ‘how did you know that was your [novel name]?’ Overall, participants generalized novel names on the basis of shape more when objects shared shape and a second feature with the exemplar. All participants provided shape‐based explanations of their choices, but explanations were increasingly more abstract across development. Finally, children's spontaneous speech was dominated by references to the objects' shape, and this did not change across development or number of shared features. Overall, these data demonstrate that the shape bias is enhanced when objects share shape and a second feature but weakened for 3‐year‐old children when objects share two non‐shape features. These findings have implications for our understanding of how children learn names for objects that belong to multiple categories. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Young children's use of syntactic cues to learn proper names and count nouns

In 6 experiments, 144 toddlers were tested in groups ranging in mean age from 20 to 37 months. In all experiments, children learned a novel label for a doll or a stuffed animal. The label was modeled syntactically as either a count noun (e.g., "This is a ZAV") or a proper name (e.g., "This is ZAV"). The object was then moved to a new location in front of the child, and a second identical-looking object was placed nearby. The children's task was to choose 1 of the 2 objects as a referent for the novel word. By 24 months, both girls (Experiment 2) and boys (Experiment 5) were significantly more likely to select the labeled object if they heard a proper name than if they heard a count noun. At 20 months, neither girls (Experiments 1 and 6) nor boys (Experiment 1) demonstrated this effect. By their 2nd birthdays, children can use syntactic information to distinguish appropriately between labels for individual objects and those for object categories.     

Learning to recognize objects

Abstract - A theory of object recognition requires a theory of shape. Despite considerable empirical and theoretical research, however, a definition of object shape has proved elusive. Two experiments provide new insights by showing that children's object recognition changes dramatically during the period between 17 and 25 months. During this time, children develop the ability to recognize stylized three-dimensional caricatures of known and novel objects. This ability is linked to the number of object names in children's vocabularies, suggesting that category learning may be a driving force behind the developmental changes.     

When humans become animals: Development of the animal category in early childhood

The current study examines 3- and 5-year-olds' representation of the concept we label 'animal' and its two nested concepts -animal(contrastive) (including only non-human animals) and animal(inclusive) (including both humans and non-human animals). Building upon evidence that naming promotes object categorization, we introduced a novel noun for two distinct objects, and analyzed children's patterns of extension. In Experiment 1, children heard a novel noun in conjunction with two non-human animals (dog, bird). Here, both 3- and 5-year-olds readily accessed animal(contrastive) and extended the noun systematically to other (previously un-named) non-human animals. In Experiment 2, children heard a novel noun in conjunction with a human and non-human animal. Here, 5-year-olds (but not 3-year-olds) accessed animal(inclusive) and extended the noun systematically to humans and non-human animals. These results underscore the developmental challenge facing young children as they identify the scope of the fundamental biological term 'animal' and its corresponding, nested concept(s).     

Late talkers show no shape bias in a novel name extension task

By 2½ years of age, children typically show a shape bias in object naming – that is, they extend object names mostly to new instances with the same shape. The acquisition of a shape bias is related to a marked increase in the rate of object name learning. This study asks whether, conversely, children who do not readily acquire new object names lack a shape bias. Twelve 2- to 3-year-old ‘late talkers’– children whose total vocabularies rank below the 30th percentile for their age – were compared with age-matched children with larger vocabularies in a novel object name extension task. The controls extended novel names across novel objects with the same shape. The late talkers showed no group perceptual bias, but many individuals extended novel names across objects with the same surface texture. The implications of the results both for the role of attentional biases in object name learning and for the etiology of some late talking are discussed.      

Evidentiality in language and cognition

What is the relation between language and thought? Specifically, how do linguistic and conceptual representations make contact during language learning? This paper addresses these questions by investigating the acquisition of evidentiality (the linguistic encoding of information source) and its relation to children's evidential reasoning. Previous studies have hypothesized that the acquisition of evidentiality is complicated by the subtleness and abstractness of the underlying concepts; other studies have suggested that learning a language which systematically (e.g. grammatically) marks evidential categories might serve as a pacesetter for early reasoning about sources of information. We conducted experimental studies with children learning Korean (a language with evidential morphology) and English (a language without grammaticalized evidentiality) in order to test these hypotheses. Our experiments compared 3- and 4-year-old Korean children's knowledge of the semantics and discourse functions of evidential morphemes to their (non-linguistic) ability to recognize and report different types of evidential sources. They also compared Korean children's source monitoring abilities to the source monitoring abilities of English-speaking children of the same age. We found that Korean-speaking children have considerable success in producing evidential morphology but their comprehension of such morphology is very fragile. Nevertheless, young Korean speakers are able to reason successfully about sources of information in non-linguistic tasks; furthermore, their performance in these tasks is similar to that of English-speaking peers. These results support the conclusion that the acquisition of evidential expressions poses considerable problems for learners; however, these problems are not (necessarily) conceptual in nature. Our data also suggest that, contrary to relativistic expectations, children's ability to reason about sources of information proceeds along similar lines in diverse language-learning populations and is not tied to the acquisition of the linguistic markers of evidentiality in the exposure language. We discuss implications of our findings for the relationship between linguistic and conceptual representations during development.     

Constraint on word-learning constraints

Many researchers have agreed that word learning in young children is guided by so-called "word-learning principles." However, these principles may make it difficult to learn a substantial part of the lexicon unless they are appropriately controlled. To learn proper names, the taxonomic assumption and/or the shape bias must be overridden; to learn names for substances, withdrawal of the whole-object assumption and/or the shape bias is required; and to learn lexical hierarchies, the mutual exclusivity assumption must be suspended. In certain languages, syntax can provide useful information in this situation. For example, if a novel noun is given to an object for which the name is known in the syntactic frame "This is X," English-speaking children may assume the noun to be a proper noun, and this will help them override the taxonomic assumption. However, this information is not available to Japanese children, since the Japanese language does not have grammatical markers to flag the distinction between count nouns and mass nouns, or the distinction between proper nouns and common nouns. In this paper, I discuss how Japanese children get around this problem.     

Naming practices and the acquisition of key biological concepts: evidence from English and Indonesian

Children's acquisition of fundamental biological concepts (living thing, animal, plant) is shaped by the way these concepts are named. In English, but not Indonesian, the name "animal" is polysemous: One sense includes all animate objects, and the other excludes humans. Because names highlight object categories, if the same name ("animal") points to two different, hierarchically related biological concepts, children should have difficulty settling on the scope of that term and its close neighbors (e.g., "alive"). Experiments with 4- to 9-year-old English- and Indonesian-speaking children revealed that "alive" poses unique interpretive challenges, especially for English-speaking children. When asked to identify entities that are "alive," older Indonesian-speaking children selected both plants and animals, but their English-speaking counterparts tended to exclude plants, which suggests that they may have misaligned "alive" with one of the "animal" senses. This work underscores the importance of considering language and cultural factors in studying the acquisition of fundamental concepts about the biological world.     

Relating print and speech: the effects of letter names and word position on reading and spelling performance

From an early age, children can go beyond rote memorization to form links between print and speech that are based on letter names in the initial positions of words (Treiman & Rodriguez, 1999; Treiman, Sotak, & Bowman, 2001). For example, children's knowledge of the name of the letter t helps them learn that the novel word TM is pronounced as team. Four experiments were carried out to determine whether letter names at the ends of words are equally useful. Four- and five-year-olds derived little benefit from such information in reading (Experiments 1 and 3) or spelling (Experiment 2), although adults did (Experiment 4). For young children, word-final information appears to have less influence on reading and spelling performance than does word-initial information. The results help delineate the circumstances under which children can go beyond a logographic approach in learning about print.     

Children learn words easier when they are interested in the category to which the word belongs

The overall pattern of vocabulary development is relatively similar across children learning different languages. However, there are considerable differences in the words known to individual children. Historically, this variability has been explained in terms of differences in the input. Here, we examine the alternate possibility that children's individual interest in specific natural categories shapes the words they are likely to learn – a child who is more interested in animals will learn a new animal name easier relative to a new vehicle name. Two‐year‐old German‐learning children (N = 39) were exposed to four novel word–object associations for objects from four different categories. Prior to the word learning task, we measured their interest in the categories that the objects belonged to. Our measure was pupillary change following exposure to familiar objects from these four categories, with increased pupillary change interpreted as increased interest in that category. Children showed more robust learning of word–object associations from categories they were more interested in relative to categories they were less interested in. We further found that interest in the novel objects themselves influenced learning, with distinct influences of both category interest and object interest on learning. These results suggest that children's interest in different natural categories shapes their word learning. This provides evidence for the strikingly intuitive possibility that a child who is more interested in animals will learn novel animal names easier than a child who is more interested in vehicles.     

Meaning matters in children's plural productions

The English plural is about the number of individuals in a set of like kinds. Two-year-old children use the plural but do not do so in all obligatory contexts. The present report asks whether the limitations on their production of the plural are related to aspects of meaning. In two Experiments plural productions were elicited from 2-year-old children for sets of size two and four and for instances of basic-level categories that were either similar or identical. Children were much more likely to produce the plural of these well-known nouns when there were four rather than two and when the instances were identical rather than merely similar. The results provide new evidence on children's acquisition of the English plural, showing that children's early productions are not just limited by knowledge of the noun and its plural form but also is limited by properties of the labeled sets in ways that are relevant to the underlying meaning of the plural.     

5岁儿童能够理解假装的心理表征:对Moe任务的质疑

本研究通过三个实验对Lillard的Moe假装任务进行了重复与改进,旨在探讨儿童对假装行为中知识状态作用的理解,进而讨论儿童对假装的心理本质的理解。实验一表明,“是否”问题使得5岁儿童在该任务上表现出肯定回答倾向;实验二表明．当改变提问方式,在问题中提供选择项目后,5岁儿童在该任务上的通过率有显著提高．肯定回答倾向明显减弱;实验三表明,当减少指导语中相互矛盾的信息、明确指出主人公知道某物而不知道另一物以及减弱对未知状态和知道状态的强调的情况下．5岁儿童能根据主人公所知道的事物来推断出其行为是在假装成该事物,能理解到知识状态在假装行为中的作用。这一结果表明5岁儿童能够理解到假装中所隐含的心理表征,Lillard所提出的Moe任务范式低估了儿童对假装的心理本质的理解能力。     

Perceptual complexity and form class cues in novel word extension tasks: how 4-year-old children interpret adjectives and count nouns

Two experiments examined the role of perceptual complexity, object familiarity and form class cues on how children interpret novel adjectives and count nouns. Four-year-old children participated in a forced-choice match-to-target task in which an exemplar was named with a novel word and children were asked to choose another one that matched the exemplar in either shape or material In experiment 1, 56 children were provided with lexical form class cues suggestive of adjectives. The results of Experiment 1 showed that perceptual complexity and not object familiarity determined whether children made material or shape matches. In Experiment 2, 56 children were provided with lexical form class cues suggestive of count nouns. The results of Experiment 2 showed that neither perceptual complexity nor object familiarity affected children's selections in the matching task. When provided with lexical form class cues suggestive of a count noun, children selected shape matches. Thus the results suggest that the perceptual properties of the objects presented to children coupled with the particular lexical form class cue determine which features of objects children attend to when interpreting novel words.     

从词汇量角度再探汉语婴儿是否存在“名词优势”

本研究采用交叉聚合设计,从词汇量角度考察了两岁左右汉语婴儿是否存在“名词优势”现象。在前测中,110名18、24和30个月龄的儿童接受了PCDI量表和父母问卷调查;6个月后,18个月和24个月组接受了PCDI量表的再测。本研究将“名词优势效应”定义为“（名词得分–动词得分）/词汇总分”（以k值表示）,将名词得分大于动词得分者定义为“名词优势者”。结果发现：（1）从各年龄组均值来看,18个月组名词优势效应较小（k = .07）,24及30个月组名词优势效应显著增大（k = .11~.19）。（2）从个体水平来看,18个月组名词优势者和动词优势者约各占50%（p > .05）,而24、30个月组中81~100%的儿童都是名词优势者。该结果提示,以往不同研究之间的分歧可能是由于名词优势是随年龄而动态变化的。