Adjectives and Nouns: Children's Strategies for Learning New Words

TAYLOR, MARJORIE, and GELMAN, SUSAN A. Adjectives and Nouns: Children's Strategies for Learning New Words. CHILD DEVELOPMENT, 1988, 59, 411-419. In this research, we examined 2 strategies that children use to figure out new word meanings: attention to linguistic form class (e.g., whether a word is a noun or an adjective), and the assumption of lexical contrast (assuming that 2 words cannot have the same meaning). In Experiment 1, 2-year-old children were each taught a new word, either a common noun (e.g., a zav) or an adjective (e.g., a zav one), for either a familiar or a novel stuffed animal. Children's interpretations of the new words were assessed by asking subjects to select the named toy from an array of 4 toys (e.g., Can you point to a zav?). Linguistic form class influenced children's interpretations. Children who heard a noun interpreted it more often as a category name than children who heard an adjective. Furthermore, children who learned a new noun interpreted the word differently depending on whether it referred to an object that already had a known label. This familiarity effect was replicated in Experiment 2. Thus, very young children use both form class and lexical contrast to interpret new words.