Object naming and later lexical development

Abstract

Object Naming and Later Lexical Development Eef Ameel (eef.ameel@psy.kuleuven.be) Department of Psychology, K.U.Leuven, Tiensestraat 102 B-3000 Leuven, Belgium Barbara Malt (barbara.malt@lehigh.edu) Department of Psychology, Lehigh University, 17 Memorial Drive East Bethlehem, PA 18015 USA Gert Storms (gert.storms@psy.kuleuven.be) Department of Psychology, K.U.Leuven, Tiensestraat 102 B-3000 Leuven, Belgium Hollander & Goldberg, 1991; Gentner, 1978). In contrast, common nouns naming familiar, concrete objects have widely been assumed to be unproblematic for children. Gentner (1978, 2005) has suggested that acquisition of common nouns is a faster process than verb acquisition because common nouns refer to entities easily segregated from their context, while verbs convey relationships among entities. This suggestion is compatible with Rosch’s (1975) proposal that common nouns capture sets of things sharing many inter-correlated properties, and with the assumption in the second-language learning literature (De Groot, 1993; Kroll, 1993) that the meanings of common nouns will tend to be closely equivalent across languages. But evidence has begun to accumulate suggesting that the case of common nouns is more complex than previously thought. Malt, Sloman, Gennari, Shi and Wang (1999) found substantial variability across languages in the sets of objects picked out by names for common household containers, even though the perception of similarity by speakers of the languages was much the same. This result indicates that the linguistic categories of a language are not strictly formed around similarity-based clusters (see also Ameel, Storms, Malt, & Sloman, 2005). Malt and Sloman (2003) found that second-language learners retained discrepancies from native speakers in their use of English nouns for common containers and other housewares even after more than 13 years of immersion in an English-language environment. These discrepancies appear to reflect non-equivalences of meaning between languages and the resultant complexity of the learning task. Andersen (1975) asked English-speaking children aged 3, 6, 9 and 12 to name ordinary drinking vessels and found that it was not until age 12 that children’s use of terms such as ‘cup’ and ‘glass’ fully converged on adult usage. Thus learning to use common nouns like an adult speaker may present challenges not yet fully appreciated. The questions we address in this paper are: First, is the learning trajectory for common nouns referring to familiar objects more extended than generally assumed? Second, what is the nature of the learning that must take place? And finally, what pushes the child toward greater convergence with the adult use after she has established a working grasp of a word? Abstract Learning to name objects is no sinecure. Children’s initial word use often will not correspond to the adult use of the same word. We suggest that semantic development may continue well past the early years of language acquisition, even for names for concrete objects. We studied evolution of the use of common nouns taking place during later lexical development. Children aged 5, 8, 10, 12 and 14 years and adults named common household objects and their naming patterns were compared. The results showed a gradual convergence to the adult categories over age. Rather than adding new words to their vocabulary, children reorganize the existing categories. Features collected from adults were used to predict the naming patterns of the different age groups. In line with Mervis (1987), children gradually learn to attend to the right features and gradually assign the appropriate weight to these features. However, the features do not tell the full story. Each language contains idiosyncratic mappings between objects and words that must be mastered through experience. Implications for theories of later lexical development are discussed. Introduction Children learning the words of a first language must isolate word forms, identify potential meanings, and assign these meanings to the newly isolated words (Clark, 1995). It appears that children need only minimal exposure to a new form before assigning some meaning to it. As soon as a possible meaning is assigned, the word is ready for use. This phenomenon, called fast mapping, allows children to add words to their vocabulary at a rapid rate during the first years of language learning (Carey, 1978). Fast mapping, however, captures only a fraction of the meaning adults attach to a word, and many studies have been devoted to understanding how children refine the meanings of words during the early years of language learning. A much smaller literature demonstrates that semantic development may continue well past the early years of language acquisition for certain word classes. For example, the meanings of orientational terms (top, bottom, front and back) are not fully mastered until the age of 5 (Clark, 1980), and several studies have shown learning periods for verb meanings extending to age 8 or 9 (e.g., Gropen, Pinker,