How specific is the shape bias?

Children tend to extend object names on the basis of sameness of shape, rather than size, color, or material-a tendency that has been dubbed the "shape bias." Is the shape bias the result of well-learned associations between words and objects? Or does it exist because of a general belief that shape is a good indicator of object category membership? The present three studies addressed this debate by exploring whether the shape bias is specific to naming. In Study 1, 3-year-olds showed the shape bias both when asked to extend a novel name and when asked to select an object of the same kind as a target object. Study 2 found the same shape bias when children were asked to generalize properties relevant to category membership. Study 3 replicated the findings from Study 1 with 2-year-olds. These findings suggest that the shape bias derives from children's beliefs about object kinds and is not the product of associative learning.     

Children's Use of Context in Interpreting "Big" and "Little"

In order to use the words "big" and "little" appropriately, adults use 3 kinds of contexts: normative (the size of the object is compared to a stored mental representation), perceptual (the object is compared to another physically present object of the same kind), and functional (the object is judged with regard to its intended use). In 3 experiments, we examined how flexibly children switch from one context to another. 2–4-year-olds judged a series of everyday objects as "big" or "little." To answer correctly, children had to judge each object twice, once in a normative context and once in a perceptual or functional context. Results showed that switching from one context to another was not inherently difficult, even for 2-year-olds. However, the direction of switch was important: children throughout the age range tested switched easily from a normative context but made errors when asked to switch to a normative context. We suggest that the normative context differs from the perceptual and functional contexts in that it is unmarked, and that unmarked contexts are accessible only when no other context has been recently experienced. When context is marked more explicitly, children shift flexibly among different meanings.     

Phonological and semantic factors in the object-naming errors of skilled and less-skilled readers

Children who read poorly have difficulty naming objects, and their errors usually bear a semantic or a phonetic resemblance to the correct words. Excessive semantic and phonetic naming errors could both be due to underlying phonological deficiencies in poor readers. When children cannot name an object because its name is not represented well in long-term memory or cannot be processed well, semantic information as well as partially available phonological information may be used in selecting an alternative response. This hypothesis was tested by looking for the joint influence of semantics and phonology in the naming errors of third-grade children. The same children were asked to name a set of pictured objects, repeat the object names after being spoken by the examiner, and recognize the objects from their spoken names. A separate group of children produced associative responses to the same pictures. First, it was found that, compared with skilled readers, less-skilled readers who named objects without any time pressure had a deficit that could not be attributed to repetition difficulty or limited vocabulary. Second, the naming errors showed a semantic relationship to the correct words that was as strong as that of the associative responses. Third, the naming errors also showed a phonetic relationship to the correct words, whereas the associative responses did not. Finding a joint semantic and phonetic effect in the naming errors of children suggests that the errors may be attributable to phonological deficiencies.     

Categorization and Naming: Basic-Level Sorting in Eighteen-Month-Olds and Its Relation to Language

2 studies investigate whether 18-month-old children spontaneously sort objects into basic-level categories, and how this ability is related to naming. In Study 1, 18-month-old children were given spontaneous sorting tasks, involving both identical objects and objects with basic-level intracategory variation. Children were scored as having passed the tasks if they produced "exhaustive grouping," that is, physically grouped all the objects of one kind into one location and the objects of the other kind into a different location. The children also received means-ends and object-permanence tasks. Children's parents received a checklist of early names. Children who produced exhaustive grouping used significantly more names than those who did not, in both identical and basic-level cases. There was no such relation between object-permanence and naming or between means-ends performance and naming. In Study 2, children received arrays of the same objects, with either identical objects or objects with basic-level variation in each group. No significant differences were found between the identical and basic-level tasks. However, as in the previous task, performance on both types of categorization was related to naming. Children who produced exhaustive grouping were reported to produce more names than those who did not. There appears to be a close relation between object categorization and naming in young children. The theoretical implications of this empirical association are discussed.     

Familiar Object Salience Affects Novel Word Learning

Children use the presence of familiar objects with known names to identify the correct referents of novel words. In natural environments, objects vary widely in salience. The presence of familiar objects may sometimes hinder rather than help word learning. To test this hypothesis, 3-year-olds (N = 36) were shown novel objects paired with familiar objects that varied in their visual salience. When the novel objects were labeled, children were slower and less accurate at fixating them in the presence of highly salient familiar objects than in the presence of less salient familiar objects. They were also less successful in retaining these word-referent pairings. While familiar objects may facilitate novel word learning in ambiguous situations, the properties of familiar objects matter.     

The birth of words: ten-month-olds learn words through perceptual salience

A core task in language acquisition is mapping words onto objects, actions, and events. Two studies investigated how children learn to map novel labels onto novel objects. Study 1 investigated whether 10-month-olds use both perceptual and social cues to learn a word. Study 2, a control study, tested whether infants paired the label with a particular spatial location rather than to an object. Results show that 10-month-olds can learn new labels and do so by relying on the perceptual salience of an object instead of social cues provided by a speaker. This is in direct contrast to the way in which older children (12-, 18-, and 24-month-olds) learn and extend new object names.     

The Influence of Shape Similarity and Shared Labels on Infants'' Inductive Inferences about Nonobvious Object Properties

This study examined the influence of object labels and shape similarity on 16- to 21-month-old infants' inductive inferences. In three experiments, a total of 144 infants were presented with novel target objects with or without a nonobvious property, followed by test objects that varied in shape similarity to the target. When objects were not labeled, infants generalized the nonobvious property to test objects that were highly similar in shape (Experiment 1). When objects were labeled with novel nouns, infants relied both on shape similarity and shared labels to generalize properties (Experiment 2). Finally, when objects were labeled with familiar nouns, infants generalized the properties to those objects that shared the same label, regardless of shape similarity (Experiment 3). The results of these experiments delineate the role of perceptual similarity and conceptual information in guiding infants' inductive inferences.     

Young Children's Comprehension of Pretend Episodes: The Integration of Successive Actions

In 3 experiments, children's comprehension of successive pretend actions was examined. In Experiment 1, children (25–38 months) watched 2 linked actions (e.g., a puppet poured pretend cereal or powder into a bowl, and then pretended to feed the contents of the bowl to a toy animal). Children realized that the pretend substance was incorporated into the second action. In Experiment 2, children (24–39 months) again watched 2 linked actions (e.g., a puppet poured pretend milk or powder into a container, and then pretended to tip the contents of the container over a toy animal). They realized that the animal would become "milky" or "powdery." In Experiment 3, children (25–36 months) drew similar conclusions regarding a substitute rather than an imaginary entity. The results are discussed with reference to children's causal understanding, their capacity for talking about objects and events in terms of their make-believe and real status, and the processes underlying pretense comprehension.     

Children's inductive inferences within superordinate categories: the role of language and category structure

One important function of categories is to allow inferences that extend beyond surface appearances. In 2 studies, preschool and second-grade children were tested on their understanding that members of a category have similar internal parts. In 1 study, children were taught new information about the internal structure of various objects (e.g., an apple), then were probed to determine how far they generalized the new information (e.g., to another apple, to other fruit, to an unrelated object). In a second study, children participated in an open-ended interview that probed whether various types of objects had "the same kinds of stuff inside." Children at both ages and in both studies drew many inferences concerning the internal children to report that members of a basic-level category had the same internal parts. Older children drew more inferences at the superordinate level than did younger children. Older children were also more sensitive to differences in category domain (natural kind vs. artifact) at both basic and superordinate levels. Altogether, these results suggest that preschool children assume that basic-level categories share internal parts. They need to refine this belief at the basic level and to extend it to superordinate-level categories.     

You go this way and I'll go that way: developmental changes in infants' detection of correlations among static and dynamic features in motion events

Four experiments utilizing the habituation procedure examined 10- to 18-month-olds' ability to detect and encode correlations among features in a motion event (N = 136). Infants were habituated to two events in which objects-with distinct parts and a distinct body-moved across a screen along a rectilinear or curvilinear motion path. Infants were then tested with one familiar event and three events in which one feature of the object (parts, body, or motion path) was presented in a novel combination with the other features. The results of the experiments revealed that 10-month-olds process independently static features in an event, but do not process correlations among dynamic features; whereas 14-month-olds detect the correlation between an object's parts and its motion trajectory, but only when the movement of parts is correlated with the motion of the object. Further, the data show that 18-month-olds detect correlations between all three features when the parts of the object move, but they detect only the relation between parts and motion path when the parts do not move. It is proposed that infants develop representations for the static and dynamic properties of objects through a sensitive perceptual system that detects individual features, whole objects, and movement properties, and a domain-general associative learning mechanism that encodes independent features and correlations among features.     

Lexical form class information guides word-to-object mapping in preschoolers

We demonstrate that lexical form class information can play a powerful role in directing the establishment of word-to-object mappings in referentially ambiguous situations. A total of 144 3- and 4-year-olds heard a novel label, modeled syntactically as either a proper name or an adjective, for a stuffed animal of a familiar kind. We then added a second object of the same kind and asked children (1) to choose one of the two objects as the referent of a second novel label, also presented syntactically as either a proper name or an adjective, and (2) to decide whether this second label could also apply to the object they did not choose. In each of three experiments, preschoolers were most likely to reject two words for the same object if both words were proper names (as if one dog could not be both "Fido" and "Rover"). They were significantly less likely to do so if both were adjectives (as if one dog could be both "spotted" and "furry") or if one was a proper name and the other was an adjective (as if one dog could be both "Fido" and "furry"). Information about lexical form class thus contributed significantly to the formation of linkages between words and objects.     

Object Properties and Knowledge in Early Lexical Learning

The ease with which young children learn object nouns suggests that they possess strategies to identify properties critical to lexical category membership. In previous work, young children used a same-shape criterion to extend new count nouns. The present research tested the generality of this shape bias. 2- and 3-year-olds were asked either to extend a novel count noun to new instances, or to choose unnamed objects to go together. The objects varied in shape, size, and texture. For half of the subjects, the objects had eyes--a property strongly associated with certain material kinds. If young children know this association, they should attend to texture as well as shape in classifying objects with eyes. With named objects only, both 2- and 3-year-old children classified eyeless objects by shape and objects with eyes by both shape and texture. The results suggest that very young children possess considerable knowledge about conditional relations between kinds of perceptual properties. Knowledge of such conditional relations may aid children in forming new categories and thus in discovering new word meanings.     

Preschoolers’ Search for Explanatory Information Within Adult–Child Conversation

This research examined children’s questions and the reactions to the answers they receive in conversations with adults. If children actively seek explanatory knowledge, they should react differently depending on whether they receive a causal explanation. Study 1 examined conversations following 6 preschoolers’ (ages 2–4 years) causal questions in naturalistic situations (using the Child Language Data Exchange System [CHILDES] database). Children more often agreed and asked follow‐up questions following adult explanations and, conversely, more often reasked their original question and provided their own explanation following nonexplanations. Study 2 replicated these patterns within an experimental task in 42 children ages 3–5 years. Children’s reactions following explanatory versus nonexplanatory information confirm that young children are motivated to seek causal information actively and use specific conversational strategies to obtain it.     

PB数据窗口对象在成绩录入系统中的应用

PowerBuilder最具有特色的地方就是提出了数据窗口对象的概念。在理论与实践相结合的前提下,使用Power-Builder建立一套符合本职工作需要的成绩录入软件,目的是将成绩录入与成绩校对相结合,省略繁琐的成绩校对工作。结合后台数据库,使用一个数据窗口对象,通过修改数据窗口对象中列的属性来完成成绩一次录入、二次录入和校对功能。     

Preschoolers' Reasoning about Density: Will It Float?

Density is a complex concept found to appear late in development. However, density has a readily apparent empirical consequence—buoyancy. Early scientific understanding of density arose through Archimedes' discovery of water displacement as a function of density, and young children have experience playing with objects in water. Therefore, a buoyancy prediction task was developed in order to access preschoolers' early understanding of density. 3–5-yearold children from 2 preschool classes, as well as adults, made buoyancy predictions for a set of objects that varied systematically in density, weight, and volume. 4–5-year-olds (from the older class) and adults were shown to demonstrate similar patterns in their judgments. Objects much more or much less dense than water were more accurately judged than objects with densities closer to the density of water. Weight and volume were found to "interfere" in these judgments in systematic ways for the older class of children and the adults. Children in the younger class (3-year-olds) showed a mean proportion correct performance of .53; they all passed a pretest, however, and no child refused to make judgments.     

Relations among parental causal attributions and children’s math performance and task persistence

The present longitudinal study examined the cross-lagged relations between parental causal attributions of children’s math success to children’s ability, parental help, children’s math performance and task persistence. A total of 735 children, their mothers, fathers and teachers were assessed twice – at the end of the second and the third grades. Children were tested in math and parents filled out questionnaires measuring causal attributions. Children’s task persistence was reported both by parents and by class teachers. The results of path analyses indicated mutual negative effects between mothers’ and fathers’ help attributions and children’s math performance, and a positive effect of mothers’ ability attributions on children’s math performance. Cross-lagged relations were also found for children’s math performance and task persistence. However, relations between parental attributions and children’s task persistence were evident only for fathers’ ability attributions. The findings emphasise the importance of examining both mothers and fathers, home and school context.     

Known and novel noun extensions: attention at two levels of abstraction

Two experiments tested the hypothesis that names direct attention at two levels of abstraction: Known names direct attention to the properties most relevant to the specific category; novel names direct attention to the shape, the property most generally relevant across known object names. English-speaking and Japanese-speaking 3-year-olds were shown a novel object that was named with (a) known nouns referring to things similar in shape or similar in material and color, and (b) novel nouns. Given known nouns, children attended to shape when the name referred to a category organized by shape, but they did not when the name referred to a category organized by other properties. Children generalized novel names by shape. The results are discussed within the debate between shape-based and taxonomic categories.     

Coordination of size standards by young children

"Big" and "little" are inherently relational terms: whether an object is considered big or little changes as the standard of comparison changes. The present studies examined how 2-, 3-, and 4-year-old children use and coordinate 2 different kinds of standards: perceptual (object is compared to another physically present object) and normative (object is compared to a class standard stored in memory). Even the youngest children were capable of using both normative and perceptual standards. When children avoided a perceptual interpretation it was because they chose a conflicting normative interpretation instead. Thus, very young children can apply different standards of comparison when judging size.     

What Can Be Learned from Something's Not Being Named

A new word-learning phenomenon is demonstrated and a new word-learning principle is proposed to account for it. In Study 1, 60 3-year-olds were shown a pair of objects and heard a novel label used repeatedly for one, but not for the other. In a forced-choice test of generalization of the label, the latter object was selected less often by the children than one that had not been present during training. This so-called Nominal Passover Effect was the same whether the speaker had completely ignored the comparison object during training or had referred to it with pronouns. The performance of a no-word control group ( N = 24) indicated that the effect was not due to a preference for the less exposed of the two choice objects. The effect is consistent with the Exhaustive Reference Principle, which stipulates that whenever a new generic word is used to name something, expect it to be extended to all entities in a situation that the speaker perceives and believes to be exemplars of the name. In Study 2 ( N = 48), the Nominal Passover Effect was replicated with 3 new sets of objects and with training language that contained only indefinite forms of reference. The passover experience was often sufficient to counteract children's tendency to generalize a novel label on the basis of perceptual similarity. The passover effect was not evident in free-choice name generalization tests in either study.     

Linking the shapes of alphabet letters to their sounds: the case of Hebrew

Learning the sounds of letters is an important part of learning a writing system. Most previous studies of this process have examined English, focusing on variations in the phonetic iconicity of letter names as a reason why some letter sounds (such as that of b, where the sound is at the beginning of the letter’s name) are easier to learn than others (such as that of w, where the sound is not in the name). The present study examined Hebrew, where variations in the phonetic iconicity of letter names are minimal. In a study of 391 Israeli children with a mean age of 5 years, 10 months, we used multilevel models to examine the factors that are associated with knowledge of letter sounds. One set of factors involved letter names: Children sometimes attributed to a letter a consonant–vowel sound consisting of the first phonemes of the letter’s name. A second set of factors involved contrast: Children had difficulty when there was relatively little contrast in shape between one letter and others. Frequency was also important, encompassing both child-specific effects, such as a benefit for the first letter of a child’s forename, and effects that held true across children, such as a benefit for the first letters of the alphabet. These factors reflect general properties of human learning.