Abstract
There is an ongoing debate over the extent to which language development shares common processing mechanisms with other domains of learning. It is well-established that toddlers will systematically extend object labels to similarly shaped category exemplars (e.g., Markman and Hutchinson, 1984; Landau et al., 1988). However, previous research is inconclusive as to whether young children will similarly extend factual information about an object to other category members. We explicitly contrast facts varying in category relevance, and test for extension using two different tasks. Three- to four-year-olds (N = 61) were provided with one of three types of information about a single novel object: a category-relevant fact (‘it’s from a place called Modi’), a category-irrelevant fact (‘my uncle gave it to me’), or an object label (‘it’s called a Modi’). At test, children provided with the object name or category-relevant fact were significantly more likely to display systematic category extension than children who learnt the category-irrelevant fact. Our findings contribute to a growing body of evidence that the mechanisms responsible for word learning may be domain-general in nature.
Highlights
Is our capacity for language the product of dedicated mental processes, or an assembly of broader cognitive mechanisms operating in unison? This question is at the heart of understanding how children learn to use and comprehend language
As expected when tested immediately, a high proportion (79–88%) of the children could demonstrate their understanding of the mapping between the target object and the novel word or fact (See Table 1)
The 61 children who correctly chose the target in the comprehension test, completed the extension test
Summary
Is our capacity for language the product of dedicated mental processes, or an assembly of broader cognitive mechanisms operating in unison? This question is at the heart of understanding how children learn to use and comprehend language. In the case of vocabulary development, the child requires the ability to map words to their referents. The problem, in theory, is that there is an infinite number of possible meanings for any given word (Quine, 1960). In practice, young children learn words with remarkable ease. By the age of seventeen, the average English-speaker knows more than 60,000 words (Bloom, 2000). Does this remarkable development require mental processes specific to the task of word learning?
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