Object naming and later lexical development: From baby bottle to beer bottle

Abstract

Despite arguments for the relative ease of learning common noun meanings, semantic development continues well past the early years of language acquisition even for names of concrete objects. We studied evolution of the use of common nouns during later lexical development. Children aged 5–14 years and adults named common household objects and their naming patterns were compared. Children showed a gradual convergence to the adult categories through addition of new words to the vocabulary as well as extended reorganizations of existing categories. Different theories of early lexical development make competing proposals about the differences in featural knowledge that result in discrepancies from adult word use. To evaluate these theories with respect to later lexical development, we used features collected from adults and children to predict the naming patterns of the different age groups. Consistent with [Mervis, C. B. (1987). Child-basic object categories and early lexical development. In U. Neisser (Ed.), Concepts and conceptual development: ecological and intellectual factors in categorisation (pp. 201–233). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press], children gradually learned to attend to the adult feature sets and to assign the features the appropriate weights. A sorting task showed that, furthermore, evolution of general conceptual knowledge as well as word-specific knowledge contributes to the convergence. We discuss implications for developing a theory of later lexical development.