Ontological categories guide young children's inductions of word meaning: Object terms and substance terms

doi:10.1016/0010-0277(91)90051-5

Cognition

Volume 38, Issue 2, February 1991, Pages 179-211

https://doi.org/10.1016/0010-0277(91)90051-5 Get rights and content

Abstract

Three experiments assessed the possibility, suggested by Quine (1960, 1969) among others, that the ontology underlying natural language is induced in the course of language learning, rather than constraining learning from the beginning. Specifically, we assessed whether the ontological distinction between objects and non-solid substances conditions projection of word meanings prior to the child's mastery of count/mass syntax. Experiments 1 and 2 contrasted unfamiliar objects with unfamiliar substances in a word-learning task. Two-year-old subjects' projection of the novel word to new objects respected the shape and number of the original referent. In contrast, their projection of new words for non-solid substances ignored shape and number. There were no effects of the child's knowledge of count/mass syntax, nor of the syntactic context in which the new word was presented. Experiment 3 revealed that children's natural biases in the absence of naming do not lead to the same pattern of results. We argue that these data militate against Quine's conjecture.

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Citation Excerpt :
Some authors indeed found that this variable had an impact on the shape bias in preschool-aged TD children; shape was used more often with two-dimensional inanimate objects than with three-dimensional inanimate objects in a word extension task (Davidson, Rainey, Vanegas, & Hilvert, 2018). Moreover, three-dimensional objects were used in previous studies of word extension using substance names (Soja et al., 1991), whereas we used two-dimensional objects, which could have affected our results. Additional information that we should have thoroughly collected is an estimation of children’s vocabulary.
In this study, we investigated the ability of children with developmental language disorder (DLD) to extend nouns referring to different categories of novel objects. In a word extension task, we used several types of object entities (solid, animate, nonsolid, functional, and spatial relations) for which children needed to attend to diverse properties (shape, texture, role, or spatial relation) to decide category membership. We compared 15 school-aged children with DLD with typically developing (TD) children matched on either age or vocabulary. Our results indicate that children with DLD were impaired in extending novel words for nonsolid substances and relational objects, whereas age-matched TD children performed well for all object classes. Similar to children with DLD, TD children matched on language had difficulty in extending spatial relation categories. We also show that children with DLD needed more learning exemplars and relied more on shape-based information than TD children, especially for spatial configuration objects. Overall, our findings suggest that children are able to learn regularities between object properties and category organization and to focus on diverse features according to the object presented when extending novel nouns. They also provide clear evidence linking DLD to deficits in novel name generalization and word learning.
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^☆: The research reported here was part of the first author's doctoral dissertation in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT. We thank Molly Potter, Sandy Waxman, Ned Block, Paul Bloom, Debbie Zaitchik, and Sandeep Prasada for their helpful discussion and comments on earlier drafts. We also thank three anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments and criticisms. We appreciate the assistance of Laura Kotovsky, Jim Melton, Nancy Turner, Jean Piper, and Thomas Soja in the testing of subjects and the data analysis.

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Ontological categories guide young children's inductions of word meaning: Object terms and substance terms☆

Abstract

Cognitive Development

Cognition

Cognitive Psychology

Cognitive Psychology

The acquisition of word meaning: An investigation into some current conflicts

Linguistic determinism and the parts of speech

Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology

The child as word learner

The principle of contrast: A constraint on language acquisition

Early lexical development

How two-year-old children interpret proper and common names for unfamiliar objects

Child Development

The acquisition of syntactic categories: The case of the count/mass distinction