Children's theory of word meaning : The role of shape similarity in early acquisition.

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This research contrasts two important proposals as to children's assumptions about word meanings : the taxonomic assumption proposal and the perceptual (color or shape) bias proposal. Both proposals agree that childen focus on groups of "like kind" in word meaning extention, but they differ in their assumption as to the nature of "likeness" for young children. We tested the two proposals by separating and comparing categry membership and perseptual similarity in a word/no-word match-to-sample task. In the first experiment, three age group children, 3-, 4- and 5-year-olds, were shown a standard object and three another pictures : a taxonomically similar object, a thematically simillar object, and a perceptually similar object. They were asked either : "This is a dax ; show me another dax "or" Find the one that goes with this one."After completing the session, in order to comfirm whether children can shift to another dimension of stimuli of the first session, children were asked "Find th … More e another one that goes with this one."There were three main results. First, the three age groups showed a pronaunced shift from thematic-based to perceptual-based responding when novel words were given. Secnd, a developmental shift was found from perceptual responding to taxonomic responding in the presence of a novel word. Third, the ease of a shift to another dimension was depending on aging, 5-year-olds children could shift to another dimension most easily.In the second experiment, we used American version as stimuli, and repeated the same procedure as the experiment I.Most findings of the experiment I were confirmed, but the shape bias function much storong.The third experiment conserns about how children'attension is directed to the taxonomic dimension. We set two traning condition : the group giving information about the function of objects, and the group giving information to attend to the commonalities of objects, and the control group same as the novel lavel condition of Experiment I and Experiment II.The main result was that younger chilren could not attend to the taxonomic dimension without information of the function of objects.These results suggest that perceptual similarity is very important in early acquisition of word meaning, but that children gradually shift their attention to deeper properties. We conjecture that this early focus on perceptual similarity may help young children learn categories, gradually bootstrapping them to a sense oftaxonomic relations that goes beyond perceptual similarity. Less