A crosslinguistic study of children's noun learning: The case of object and substance words

Abstract

The study reported in this paper uses a crosslinguistic approach to investigate universal versus language-specific influences on children's attention when learning object and substance names. We compared English- and Mandarin Chinese-speaking 3- and 4-year-old children and adults' attention to shape versus material in a labeling and non-labeling task. Participants saw either an object or substance standard in the context of either a labeling (‘Is this also the riff?’) or non-labeling task (‘Is this the same as this?’). On the labeling task, 3-year-old Chinese speakers attended to shape, whereas 4-year-old and adult Chinese speakers attended to material, regardless of whether the standard was an object or a substance. Among English speakers, 3-year-olds attended to shape when labeling the object and substance standards, 4-year-olds showed a preference for shape when labeling the object but no preference between shape and material when labeling the substance standard. English-speaking adults showed a preference toward shape when labeling the object standard and material when labeling the substance standard. On the non-labeling task, 4-year-old and adult Chinese speakers attended to material, whereas younger Chinese speakers attended to shape; English speakers of all ages attended to shape, with 4-year-olds and adults showing greater attention to shape in the non-labeling task compared to the labeling task. The results are discussed in terms of language general and language-specific processes in word learning.