Mapping Words to the World in Infancy: Infants' Expectations for Count Nouns and Adjectives

Booth, Amy E.; Waxman, Sandra R.

doi:10.1207/s15327647jcd0403_06

Cited by 88 publications

(86 citation statements)

References 49 publications

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“…This study reveals that infants of 14 months are equipped with the cognitive skills to begin to map novel words onto particular spatial relations and that infants of this age are not restricted to associating novel words with only objects or object properties (Booth &Waxman, 2003;Waxman & Booth, 2001;Werker et al, 1998). Although it is clear that infants can recruit sensitivity to co-occurrence and information in the linguistic input to begin to comprehend spatial language, certainly other factors not included in this study also contribute to the acquisition of spatial language and aid infants in attending to linguistically relevant spatial relations.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 87%

“…They also argued that children's own linguistic knowledge plays an important role in directing their attention to the referent of a novel word. Indeed, Waxman and Booth (2001;Booth & Waxman, 2003) showed that infants of 14 months can use the syntactic context of a novel word to map a novel count noun onto an object and a novel adjective onto an object property. However, research has yet to explore whether 14-month-old infants can do the same with a novel word that refers to a spatial relation.…”

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confidence: 99%

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14‐Month‐Old Infants Form Novel Word—Spatial Relation Associations

Casasola

Wilbourn

2004

Infancy

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This study explored 14-month-old infants' ability to form novel word-spatial relation associations. During habituation, infants heard 1 novel word (e.g., teek) while viewing dynamic containment events (i.e., Big Bird placed in a box) and, on other habituation trials, a second novel word (e.g., blick) while viewing dynamic support events (i.e., Big Bird placed on the box). Each novel word was presented in a sentence (e.g., "She's putting Big Bird teek the box"). During the test, infants discriminated an event that maintained the habituation word-relation pairing from one that presented a switch in this pairing. The results indicate that 14-month-olds can learn to form wordrelation associations quickly, requiring only a few minutes of experience with each word-relation pairing.Although word learning is the end result of a number of linguistic, cognitive, and social abilities, infants also can learn novel labels under impoverished conditions, relying on a few or even a single source of information to link a novel word to its referent. For example, infants can use the co-occurrence of a novel word and a referent as the sole source of information for associating the word to an object (Schafer & Plunkett, 1998;Werker, Cohen, Lloyd, Casasola, & Stager, 1998) or an action (Casasola & Cohen, 2000). When cooccurrence is insufficient to specify the referent of a novel word, 16-month-old infants use a speaker's gaze to disambiguate which of two objects is being labeled (Baldwin, 1993). Hence, when it comes to word learning, infants are quite resourceful in finding information to link novel words to their corresponding referents. Thus far, research on early word learning has focused mainly on infants' acquisition of object labels and the range of cues they to use to map a novel word onto an object (e.g., Baldwin & Moses, 2001;Hollich et al., 2000). The question explored in this study is whether infants as young as 14 months can be resourceful in using limited sources of information, and limited exposure to a novel word and an event, to link a novel word to a spatial relation.Rather than relying on the spatial words produced by children (e.g., Choi & Bowerman, 1991;Tomasello, 1987), more recent studies on the acquisition of spatial language have examined infants' and toddlers' comprehension of spatial morphemes. For example, Meints, Plunkett, Harris, and Dimmock (2002) found that 15-month-old infants comprehend on as corresponding to a cat sitting on the center of a table and under as corresponding to the cat sitting under the table. Similarly, Choi, McDonough, Bowerman, and Mandler (1999) found that English-and Korean-learning toddlers of 18 to 23 months comprehend spatial terms according to the semantic pattern of their ambient language. They found that Englishlearning toddlers comprehended in as referring to one object being placed in a containment relation to a second object, whereas Korean-learning toddlers correctly comprehended the Korean morpheme kkita as referring to one object being placed in a tight-fit rel...

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 87%

mentioning

confidence: 99%

14‐Month‐Old Infants Form Novel Word—Spatial Relation Associations

Casasola

Wilbourn

2004

Infancy

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“…Specifically, words that can be used flexibly may contrast in meaning when used in mass and count syntax because syntax actually invites the speaker to posit different meanings for each form (see Booth & Waxman, 2003, Waxman & Braun, 2005, for a proposal of this kind). Rather than beginning with a multi-faceted concept that supports both individuated and unindividuated interpretations, children learning language may initially posit only one interpretation or "construal" per lexical item, and posit additional interpretations for each new syntactic expression of a word.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Countability in Absence of Count Syntax: Evidence from Japanese Quantity Judgments

Inagaki¹,

Barner²

2016

Preprint

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We investigated the interaction of mass-count syntax and item-specific word meanings by comparing quantity judgments in two mass-count languages (English, French) and a classifier language (Japanese). Speakers of both English and Japanese based quantity judgments on volume for substance-mass terms (e.g., judging two large portions of toothpaste to be more toothpaste than six tiny portions) but on number for count nouns (e.g., shoes) and object-mass nouns (e.g., judging that six small pieces of furniture are more furniture than two large pieces).For words that can be used in either mass or count syntax in English (e.g., string), English quantity judgments shifted as a function of mass-count syntax (i.e., based on number when used in count syntax, but on volume when used in mass syntax), while approximately 50% of Japanese quantity judgments were based on number, falling between English mass and count judgments. For words that are mass nouns in English but count nouns in French (e.g., spinach), quantity judgments shifted as a function of syntax between these languages, while Japanese judgments were not different from the count judgments of French speakers, and were based mainly on number. We argue that, across languages, mass-count syntax is not necessary for nouns to specify individuation, but acts to select from among universally available lexical meanings.3

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“…In recent studies, Booth and Waxman (2003) suggested further that by 14 months, children know something quite specific about the linguistic cues in English that are associated with noun categories; they found that infants attend to object categories only given a word presented as a novel count noun (e.g., "a dax") but not when presented as a novel adjective (e.g., "a daxy one"). These results provide clear evidence of early learned links between linguistic cues and kind of lexical category.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

From the Lexicon to Expectations About Kinds: A Role for Associative Learning.

Colunga¹,

Smith²

2005

Psychological Review

238

282

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In the novel noun generalization task, 2 1/2-year-old children display generalized expectations about how solid and nonsolid things are named, extending names for never-before-encountered solids by shape and for never-before-encountered nonsolids by material. This distinction between solids and nonsolids has been interpreted in terms of an ontological distinction between objects and substances. Nine simulations and behavioral experiments tested the hypothesis that these expectations arise from the correlations characterizing early learned noun categories. In the simulation studies, connectionist networks were trained on noun vocabularies modeled after those of children. These networks formed generalized expectations about solids and nonsolids that match children's performances in the novel noun generalization task in the very different languages of English and Japanese. The simulations also generate new predictions supported by new experiments with children. Implications are discussed in terms of children's development of distinctions between kinds of categories and in terms of the nature of this knowledge.Concepts are hypothetical constructs, theoretical devices hypothesized to explain data, what people do, and what people say. The question of whether a particular theory can explain children's concepts is therefore semantically strange because strictly speaking this question asks about an explanation of an explanation. We begin with this reminder because the goal of the research reported here is to understand the role of associative processes in children's systematic attention to the shape of solid things and to the material of nonsolid things in the task of forming new lexical categories. These attentional biases have been interpreted in terms of children's concepts about the ontological kinds of object and substance (e.g., Dickinson, 1988;Imai & Gentner, 1997;Soja, Carey, & Spelke, 1992;Subrahmanyam, Landau, & Gelman, 1999). These concepts and the notion of a psychological ontology are theoretical constructs offered within the framework that posits propositional representations.In the simulations and experiments reported here, we show how abstract distinctions about different kinds of categories may be made through associative learning and the patterns of correlations between the perceptual properties of things and words. The theoretical explanation we offer and the experiments we report do not explain the hypothetical constructs of object and substance nor do they fully replace these constructs by explaining all of the data that have been subsumed under them. Nonetheless, the results do show how simple associative processes may create abstract distinctions about different kinds and, in so doing, these processes may play a crucial role in children's category and lexical learning.

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Mapping Words to the World in Infancy: Infants' Expectations for Count Nouns and Adjectives

Cited by 88 publications

References 49 publications

14‐Month‐Old Infants Form Novel Word—Spatial Relation Associations

14‐Month‐Old Infants Form Novel Word—Spatial Relation Associations

Countability in Absence of Count Syntax: Evidence from Japanese Quantity Judgments

From the Lexicon to Expectations About Kinds: A Role for Associative Learning.

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