Once again on norms and comparison classes

Abstract

A central assumption about relative adjectives (e.g. big, old)

Adjective Semantics, World Knowledge and Visual Context: Comprehension of Size Terms by 2- to 7-Year-Old Dutch-Speaking Children

“…More precisely, children younger than age five should select an equal number of objects for 'small' and 'big'. From age five onwards, children, like adults in the previous experiments (Tribushinina 2010(Tribushinina , 2011, will call more objects 'small' than 'big', because all test stimuli are smaller than in reality.…”

“…The procedure developed by Tribushinina (2011) for research with adults was adopted in this study and adjusted for research with children. The test materials were 48 coloured computergenerated images of seven same-kind objects incrementally increasing or decreasing in size (see Fig.…”

“…The fact that the subjects chose several elephants and several mosquitoes as being 'big' and 'small', but the ranges labelled 'big' and 'small' were asymmetric, strongly suggests that their judgments were based on a context-specific reference point constructed by integrating the reference class in the visual context with their knowledge of object sizes in reality. Tribushinina (2011) extended this work by including a greater variety of typically big and typically small categories, as well as middle-sized categories. In that study, all test pictures were smaller than in reality.…”

“…small for a conceptual reference point, but big within the visually given range) are more complex and, therefore, require more processing time (Paivio 1975;Šetić and Dominjan 2007). This paper goes a step further and investigates children's developing ability to integrate different sources of information for interpreting spatial adjectives using the scalar judgment procedure developed in Tribushinina (2011).…”

“…Thus, by age three children are able to use either a conceptual or a perceptual reference point for adjective interpretation. It is, however, not clear whether they are also able to integrate the two sources of information into a more complex context-sensitive reference point the way adults do (Tribushinina 2010(Tribushinina , 2011.…”