Elsevier

Cognitive Psychology

Volume 16, Issue 1, January 1984, Pages 1-27
Cognitive Psychology

Children's sensitivity to constraints on word meaning: Taxonomic versus thematic relations

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Abstract

A major problem in language learning is to figure out the meaning of a word given the enormous number of possible meanings for any particular word. This problem is exacerbated for children because they often find thematic relations between objects to be more salient than the objects' taxonomic category. Yet most single nouns refer to object categories and not to thematic relations. How do children learn words referring to categories when they find thematic relations so salient? We propose that children limit the possible meanings of nouns to refer mainly to categorical relations. This hypothesis was tested in four studies. In each study, preschool children saw a series of target objects (e.g., dog), each followed by a thematic associate (e.g., bone) and a taxonomic associate (e.g., cat). When children were told to choose another object that was similar to the target (“See this? Find another one.”), they as usual often selected the thematic associate. In contrast, when the instructions included an unknown word for the target (“See this fep? Find another fep.”), children now preferred the taxonomic associate. This finding held up for 2- and 3-year-olds at the basic level of categorization, for 4- and 5-year-olds at the superordinate level of categorization, and 4- and 5-year-olds who were taught new taxonomic and new thematic relations for unfamiliar objects. In each case, children constrained the meaning of new nouns to refer mainly to categorical relations. By limiting the hypotheses that children need to consider, this constraint tremendously simplifies the problem of language learning.

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    This paper was completed while E. M. Markman was at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, which received support from NSF Grant BNS8206304 and the Spencer Foundation. This research was supported in part by a Stanford University Fellow-ship and NIMH Traineeship to J. E. Hutchinson. Portions of the research were presented at meetings of the Society for Research in Child Development, Detroit, 1983, and the Western Psychological Association, San Francisco, 1983.

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