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Overextensions in comprehension and production revisited: preferential-looking in a study of dog, cat, and cow*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 September 2008

Letitia G. Naigles  and
Susan A. Gelman
Letitia G. Naigles*
Affiliation:
Yale University
Susan A. Gelman
Affiliation:
University of Michigan
*
Department of Psychology, Yale University, Box 208205 Yale Station, New Haven, CT 06520–8205, USA.
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Abstract

This study investigated overextensions in comprehension and production using a new method (the preferential-looking paradigm) in which children (N = 99, mean age (younger) = 1;9, mean age (older) = 2;3) were asked to find the referent that matched the label they were given. Both Real Referent (in which there was a match) and Anomalous (in which there was no match) trials were included, as well as nonverbal control trials. During the Real Referent trials, all children significantly preferred the matching puppet. During the Anomalous trials, children showed no preference with two of the labels (dog and cat); however, they did show a preference when ‘cow’ was requested but not available. There were no differences based on prior overextension performance in production. It is concluded that overextensions in production are not diagnostic of children's underlying semantic representations, and that anomalous trials in comprehension provide useful information concerning young children's lexical entries.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 22 , Issue 1 , February 1995 , pp. 19 - 46
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1995

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Footnotes

[*]

This research was supported by NIH FIRST Award HD26595 to the first author and NSF Faculty Award for Women Scientists and Engineers BNS-9100348 to the second author. We are grateful to Athina Pappas, Edward Kako, Chris Hawkins, Alex Bilsky, Sara Krieger, Vaijanthi Sarma, Hannah Silverstein, Karen Lin, Melissa Highter, Kristina Hanson and all the volunteers at the Yale Infant Language Lab for their invaluable assistance with data collection and analysis. We thank Eve Clark, Marilyn Shatz, Twila Tardif and our two reviewers for their insights and commentary, and the parents and children for their participation in these studies.

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