Learning Adjectives in the Real World: How Learning Nouns Impedes Learning Adjectives

Catherine Sandhofer,Linda B Smith

doi:10.1080/15475440701360465

Abstract

Previous studies have documented that children are slow to acquire adjectives into their productive vocabulary. Yet in laboratory studies, even very young children can extend novel adjectives to new instances. Two studies examined the relation between children's acquisition of adjectives and children's emerging knowledge about nouns. In Study 1, the input parents provide to children when talking about properties was examined. The results indicate that the type of input provided in laboratory experiments is infrequent in parent speech to children, and that parents often talk about adjectives using syntax that is ambiguous as to the adjectival status of the words and confusable with nouns. In Study 2 children participated in a training study designed to teach children color words without strong syntactic cues. In Study 3 children participated in a training study designed to teach children color words with syntactic cues that strongly indicated the adjectival status of the word. The results show that younger children who had fewer nouns in their productive vocabulary learned more without strong syntactic cues whereas the older children who had more nouns in their productive vocabulary were more likely to benefit from hearing strong syntactic cues.

Highlights

Previous studies have documented that children are slow to acquire adjectives into their productive vocabulary
The results indicate that the type of input provided in laboratory experiments is infrequent in parent speech to children, and that parents often talk about adjectives using syntax that is ambiguous as to the adjectival status of the words and confusable with nouns
The results show that the syntax immediately surrounding adjectives may not provide the types of linguistic cues that lead to successful acquisition of adjectives in laboratory experiments

Summary

Introduction

Previous studies have documented that children are slow to acquire adjectives into their productive vocabulary. Laboratory studies demonstrating children’s early skill in mapping adjectives to appropriate meanings show that children’s knowledge of noun meanings (Hall, Waxman & Hurwitz, 1993; Mintz, 2005), the inclusion of linguistic cues that distinguish nouns from adjectives (Smith, Jones, Landau, 1992; Waxman & Booth, 2001), and the explicit mention of a known noun when the novel adjective is presented (Mintz & Gleitman, 2002) all benefit children’s mapping of a novel adjective to a property. The puzzle is this: Given children’s sensitivity to these cues in laboratory experiments and despite their well-developed knowledge of nouns, their acquisition of real-world adjectives is surprisingly slow.

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Conclusion