Shape, Material, and Syntax: Interacting Forces in Children's Learning in Novel Words for Objects and Substances

Abstract

In three studies, we examined the roles of ontological and syntactic information in children's learning of words for physical entities, such as objects and substances. In Experiment 1, 3-year-olds and 4- to 5-year-olds, and adults first saw either an Object or Substance Standard labelled with either a mass or a count noun. Transfer items varied in shape and/or material as compared to the Standards. The 3-year-olds attended to ontologically relevant information about the Standard (i.e. its object/substance status), whereas 4- to 5-year-olds and adults used the syntactic context that marked the label as a mass or count noun. However, the tendency for 4- to 5-year olds to use the syntactic context when they heard a label (mass or count) was less pronounced when the Standards were more ambiguous (Experiment 2). In Experiment 3, 3-year-olds who were shown the Object or Substance Standard in a No-Name similarity judgement task, attended to shape for both Standard types. This contrasts with the findings from Experiment 1, and suggests that attention to information about the ontological status of a referent may only become relevant during labelling. Our results reveal a strong and changing developmental interaction for the use of ontologically relevant perceptual information, labels, and syntax. Early ontological/ conceptual biases might serve as a scaffold for the later more determinate attention to syntactic information during word learning.