Research has shown that by about 3-years of age, children learning English attend to ontological information (e.g., objects are bounded and have rigid shapes) when generalizing object and substance labels; by about 4-years they attend to the syntactic context (mass or count noun) of the label. Other research suggests that very young learners might be guided by expectations about labels during word learning. It is unclear whether attention to ontological kind is guided by such expectations, and if so, whether the expectations are language-specific or universal. The proposed research will investigate young children's learning of object and substance words using a cross-linguistic framework. It will examine whether expectations about labels guide children early in word learning and examine their nature over development. Finally it will assess when children start attending to other sources of information, such as the syntactic context, when generalizing novel labels. In Experiment 1, 4- to 5-year-olds and adult Spanish-speakers will be tested on a Label ("Is this also the dax?" and No-label task ("Is this the same as this?") using a "yes" or "no" method. In Experiment 2, 2-1/2- to 3-, 3- and4-year old-children and adult English-, Chinese (Mandarin)-, and Spanish-speakers will be tested on a Label ("Is this the dax or is this the dax?") and No-label task ("Is this the same as this or is this the same as this?") using a forced-choice task. In Experiment 3, English-speaking 2-1/2- to 3-year-olds and 3- to 4-year-olds will be tested only in a Label task, in which labels will be presented as either a count or mass noun. We expect that the youngest speakers of all 3 languages might be guided by similar expectations that subsequently more language-specific expectations will guide their attention. Based on an analysis of noun phrase structure, it is expected that Spanish- and English-speakers will attended to ontological kind, whereas Chinese-speakers will attend to material during labeling. We also expect to obtain language-specific construals from older children and adult s in the No-label task. In sum, the proposed research will clarify how universal language mechanisms interact with more language-specific mechanisms to guide learners' attention to different aspects of the stimulus and how language impacts non-linguistic tasks.
NIH ExPorter
NIH ExPorter