Word meaning biases or language-specific effects? Evidence from English, Spanish and Korean

Abstract

This study examines the hypothesis that children learning distinct languages will show differential adherence to proposed word- meaning, biases. English-, Spanish-, and Korean-speaking pre schoolers were tested for their extension of new nouns to referents that shared shape, substance and/or functional properties with the initial referent. English- and Spanish-speaking subjects performed differently from Korean-speaking children. Korean speakers gave more substance-based responses than the other groups, and their responses took functional information into account, while those of Spanish and English speakers did not. Results lend support to the position that children's first best guesses about the meanings of new words are dependent on the structure of the language they are learning, and they challenge the notion that children have universal word learning biases.