Collaborative Research: The Origins of Word Learning

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9615391 GOLINKOFF Before children can tie their shoes they have learned thousands of words. Yet little is known about the process of early word learning, partly because of the methodological barriers researchers have faced in attempting to work with preverbal and barely verbal children. This research will use two new methods to investigate how young children (approximately 10-24 months of age) learn the words of their native language. The particular focus will be on how children learn object names since, around the world, object names predominate in children's earliest vocabularies. Previous research has suggested that children are guided by a set of six principles in learning new words, principles which narrow the range of choices which children must consider for what a new word might mean. These principles are organized into two "tiers," with the first tier present by the end of the first year of life. The three principles in the first tier are (1) "reference," or the idea that a word can "map to" or become linked to an object in the world, (2) "extendibility," the fact that a word does not just name the original object but a class of objects (e.g., "dog" does not just label Fido, the family dog, but all dogs), and (3) "object scope," the assumption that a new word labels an object (as opposed to say, an action) and that it labels the whole object (versus just an interesting part of the object). The eleven experiments in this project are designed to understand how children derive these three principles of the first tier. In all the experiments, children will be taught the names of novel objects under various conditions in order to probe the processes by which they learn new words. Since young children do not often talk on command, in all the experiments, children will be asked to show their word learning facility through their language comprehension instead of through language production. The research will seek to answer three questions. The firs t is the question of emergence, i.e., when does each principle appear and does each principle have both a mature and an immature form? The second is the question of mechanism, i.e., what mechanisms are responsible for the appearance of each principle and do children of different ages rely on different cues as they deploy these principles for word learning? The finally question is that of language specificity, i.e., do words have some special status for children (the way they do for adults) or are they treated just the same as other environmental sounds? For example, does an object's name come to stand for the child's concept of that object, in a way different from, say, the sound that the object makes? Answers to these questions will illuminate the mysterious process by which word learning occurs as well as advance knowledge of cognitive development in general. Furthermore, as we succeed in lessening the mystery of word learning, we will be in a far better position to use our knowledge of the word learning process to aid those children who are having difficulty with that process. ***