Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-dk4vv Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-22T17:33:01.680Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Children's preference for HAS and LOCATED relations: A word learning bias for noun–noun compounds*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 June 2009

ANDREA KROTT ,
CHRISTINA L. GAGNÉ  and
ELENA NICOLADIS
ANDREA KROTT*
Affiliation:
University of Birmingham
CHRISTINA L. GAGNÉ
Affiliation:
University of Alberta
ELENA NICOLADIS
Affiliation:
University of Alberta
*
Address for correspondence: Andrea Krott, School of Psychology, University of Birmingham, Edgbaston, Birmingham B15 2TT, United Kingdom. tel: +44 (0)121 414 4903; fax: +44 (0)121 4144897; e-mail: [email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

The present study investigates children's bias when interpreting novel noun–noun compounds (e.g. kig donka) that refer to combinations of novel objects (kig and donka). More specifically, it investigates children's understanding of modifier–head relations of the compounds and their preference for HAS or LOCATED relations (e.g. a donka that HAS a kig or a donka that is LOCATED near a kig) rather than a FOR relation (e.g. a donka that is used FOR kigs). In a forced-choice paradigm, two- and three-year-olds preferred interpretations with HAS/LOCATED relations, while five-year-olds and adults showed no preference for either interpretation. We discuss possible explanations for this preference and its relation to another word learning bias that is based on perceptual features of the referent objects, i.e. the shape bias. We argue that children initially focus on a perceptual stability rather than a pure conceptual stability when interpreting the meaning of nouns.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 37 , Issue 2 , March 2010 , pp. 373 - 394
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2009

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

[*]

We express our gratitude to the children, parents and teachers of the following nurseries and primary schools who participated in our study: Busy Little Bees, Grace Mary Primary School, Little Angels Nursery, Little Robins Day Nursery, Russel Day Nursery, Small World, Coogee Nursery and St Margaret Mary Primary School. We also thank Sidra Aslam, Nicola Duggan and Elizabeth Ann Colledge for creating the stimuli and/or conducting the experiments and Sotaro Kita and the reviewers for comments on an earlier version of this manuscript. This research was supported by a British Academy Joint Activities Grant and a British Academy Small Grant (SG-44074), an Undergraduate Research Bursary from the Nuffield Foundation (URB/33283), a Vacation Scholarship from the Wellcome Trust (VS/06/BIR/A5), NSERC Discovery Grant 203054 and NSERC Discovery Grant 245058.

References

REFERENCES

Barnat, S. B., Klein, P. J. & Meltzoff, A. N. (1996). Deferred imitation across changes in context and object: Memory and generalization in 14-month-old infants. Infant Behavior & Development 19(2), 241–51.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Bauer, L. (1983). English word-formation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Booth, A. E. & Waxman, S. R. (2002). Object names and object functions serve as cues to categories for infants. Developmental Psychology 38(6), 948–57.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Clark, E. V. (1981). Lexical innovations: How children learn to create new words. In Deutsch, W. (ed.), The child's construction of language, 299–328. London: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Clark, E. V. & Berman, R. A. (1987). Types of linguistic knowledge: Interpreting and producing compound nouns. Journal of Child Language 14, 547–67.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Clark, E. V., Gelman, S. A. & Lane, N. M. (1985). Compound nouns and category structure in young children. Child Development 56, 84–94.Google Scholar
Dale, P. S. & Fenson, L. (1996). Lexical development norms for young children. Behavior Research Methods, Instruments, & Computers 28, 125–27.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Deák, G. O., Ray, S. D. & Pick, A. D. (2002). Matching and naming objects by shape or function: Age and context effects in preschool children. Developmental Psychology 38(4), 503–518.Google Scholar
Diesendruck, G., Markson, L. and Bloom, P. (2003). Children's reliance on creator's intent in extending names for artifacts. Psychological Science 14(2), 164–68.Google Scholar
Diessel, H. & Tomasello, M. (2000). The development of relative clauses in spontaneous child speech. Cognitive Linguistics 11(1–2), 131–51.Google Scholar
Downing, P. (1977). On the creation and use of English compound nouns. Language 53(4), 810–42.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gagné, C. L. (2001). Relation and lexical priming during the interpretation of noun–noun combinations. Journal of Experimental Psychology–Learning Memory and Cognition 27(1), 236–54.Google Scholar
Gentner, D. (1982a). A study of early word meaning using artificial objects: What looks like a jiggy but acts like a zimbo? In Gardner, J. (ed.), Readings in developmental psychology, 137–43. Boston: Little Brown.Google Scholar
Gentner, D. (1982b). Why nouns are learned before verbs: Linguistic relativity versus natural partitioning. In Kuczaj, S. (ed.), Language development: Volume 2. Language, thought, and culture, 301–334). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Gershkoff-Stowe, L. & Smith, L. B. (2004). Shape and the first hundred nouns. Child Development 75(4), 1098–1114.Google Scholar
Gleitman, L. R. & Gleitman, H. (1970). Phrase and paraphrase: Some innovative uses of language. New York: W. W. Norton.Google Scholar
Graham, S. A., Williams, L. D. & Huber, J. F. (1999). Preschoolers' and adults' reliance on object shape and object function for lexical extension. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 74(2), 128–51.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Jones, S. S. (2003). Late talkers show no shape bias in a novel name extension task. Developmental Science 6(5), 477–83.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Krott, A., Gagné, C. & Nicoladis, E. (2009). How the parts relate to the whole: frequency effects on children's interpretations of novel compounds. Journal of Child Language 36(1), 85–112.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Landau, B., Smith, L. & Jones, S. (1998). Object shape, object function, and object name. Journal of Memory and Language 38(1), 1–27.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Levi, J. (1978). The syntax and semantics of complex nominals. New York: Academic Press.Google Scholar
MacWhinney, B. (2000). The CHILDES project: Tools for analyzing talk. Third Edition. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.Google Scholar
Madole, K. L., Oakes, L. M. & Cohen, L. B. (1993). Developmental-changes in infants attention to function and form–function correlations. Cognitive Development 8(2), 189–209.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Markman, E. M. (1989). Categorization and naming in children. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Merriman, W. E., Scott, P. D. & Marazita, J. (1993). An appearance function shift in children's object naming. Journal of Child Language 20(1), 101–118.Google Scholar
Nicoladis, E. (2003). What compound nouns mean to preschool children. Brain and Language 84, 38–49.Google Scholar
Parault, S. J., Schwanenflugel, P. J. & Haverback, H. R. (2005). The development of interpretations for novel noun–noun conceptual combinations during the early school years. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 91(1), 67–87.Google Scholar
Quine, W. V. (1960). Word and object. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Samuelson, L. K. (2002). Statistical regularities in vocabulary guide language acquisition in connectionist models and 15–20-month-olds. Developmental Psychology 38(6), 1016–37.Google Scholar
Smith, L. B. (1999). Children's noun learning: How general learning processes make specialized learning mechanisms. In MacWhinney, B. (ed.), The emergence of language, 277–303. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Smith, L. B., Jones, S. S. & Landau, B. (1996). Naming in young children: A dumb attentional mechanism? Cognition 60(2), 143–71.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Smith, L. B., Jones, S. S., Landau, B., Gershkoff-Stowe, L. & Samuelson, L. (2002). Object name learning provides on-the-job training for attention. Psychological Science 13(1), 13–19.Google Scholar
Smith, L. B. & Samuelson, L. (2006). An attentional learning account of the shape bias: Reply to Cimpian and Markman (2005) and Booth, Waxman, and Huang (2005). Developmental Psychology 42(6), 1339–43.Google Scholar
Štekauer, P. (2005). Meaning predictability in word formation. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tomikawa, S. A. & Dodd, D. H. (1980). Early word meanings – Perceptually or functionally based. Child Development 51(4), 1103–09.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Warren, B. (1978). Semantic patterns of noun–noun compounds. Goteborg: Acta Universitatis Gothoburgensis.Google Scholar