What's in a noun? Welsh-, English-, and Spanish- speaking children see it differently

Abstract

This paper examines young children's abilities to interpret new words as referring to collections. Two experiments examine English-, Spanish-, and Welsh-speaking children's interpretations of novel nouns that could refer either to a single object or to a collection. Experiment 1 tested 53 3- and 4-year-olds; Experiment 2 tested 30 2- to 3-year-olds and 30 4- to 5-year-olds. As early as two years of age, children's responses to new nouns differ across these languages in ways that are consistent with differences in the languages they are learning. These results go counter to recent hypotheses claiming that children have innate or built-in biases concerning the meanings of new words. We argue that what the empirical data in those studies have been showing is not that children rely on built-in word meaning biases to determine the meanings of words, but rather that English-speaking children have learned something about the structure of English nouns and are relying on this knowledge to learn new nouns. We conclude that children learning distinct languages develop different types of first best guesses about the meanings of new words. Those first best guesses are a product of what children have already learned about how meanings get encoded in their language.