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.     

Reorganizing the lexicon by learning a new word: Japanese children's interpretation of the meaning of a new word for a familiar artifact

This research investigated how children interpret the meaning of a new word associated with a familiar artifact. The existing literature has shown that syntactic form-class information plays an important role in making this kind of inference. However, this information is not available to Japanese children, because Japanese language does not have a grammatical distinction between count nouns and mass nouns, proper nouns and common nouns, or singular and plural. In Study 1, 12 three-year-old monolingual Japanese children were tested to examine whether they interpreted a new noun associated with a familiar artifact to be a material name or a new label for the object. They interpreted the new word as a new category label for the object, rather than as a name for the material. How children related the new category to the old familiar one was then examined in Studies 2 and 3. The results of Study 2, in which 24 three-year-olds participated, showed that children could flexibly shift between two interpretations using shape information. When the named object had a typical shape for the familiar category, they mapped the new word to a subordinate category. In contrast, when the shape of the named object was atypical, they mapped the new word to a new category that was mutually exclusive to the familiar category by excluding the named object from the familiar category. In Study 3, 12 three-year-olds were tested to examine relative importance of shape and functional information in this inference process. The results of the three studies suggest that children flexibly recruit clues from multiple sources, but the cluesare weighed in hierarchical order so that they can determine the single most plausible solution in a given situation when different clues suggest different solutions.     

整体假设原则与儿童新物体名词习得关系的实证研究

通过对湖南某幼儿园8名2至4岁的儿童进行新物体名词习得的研究表明：2-4岁的儿童都会依据整体假设原则来学习一个不熟悉物体的新名称,其中女孩比男孩更依赖整体假设原则。此外,比起可数名词来,儿童更倾向于依据整体假设原则来习得不可数名词。     

Learning proper nouns and common nouns without clues from syntax

Syntax has been noted to play an important role in word learning in English; it distinguishes the fundamental conceptual difference between individuals (coded as proper nouns), nonindividuals (coded as mass nouns), and classes of individuals (coded as count nouns). The Japanese language does not have grammatical markers flagging the distinctions between count nouns and mass nouns, between proper nouns and common nouns, or between singulars and plurals. How Japanese 2- and 4-year-olds assign meaning to novel nouns associated with familiar and unfamiliar animals and inanimate objects was studied in the research reported here. When a novel label was given to an unfamiliar object, children assumed it to be a name for a basic-level object category whether the referent was an animal or an inanimate object. If the named object already had an established name, and if the object was an inanimate object, the children mapped the noun to a subordinate category. When the named object was an animal, however, they tended to interpret the label as a proper name. These results demonstrated that in the absence of useful information from syntax, 2-year-old Japanese children are able to fast map a noun to its meaning by elegantly coordinating word-learning biases and other available sources of information.     

Incorporating new words into the lexicon: preliminary evidence for language hierarchies in two-year-old children

In 4 experiments, we examined how young children incorporate new word meanings into their lexicons. 2-year-olds were each taught a new noun for an object that already had a known label (e.g., a "fep" for a dog). Children's interpretations of the new nouns were assessed by asking subjects to select the named toy from an array of 4 toys (e.g., "Point to a fep"). The experiments were designed to determine which of several possible semantic relations between novel and familiar words was most consistent with children's performance. It was found that children often seemed to interpret the new word as referring to a subordinate of the known category. This tendency was reduced when the named object could sensibly receive a proper name (e.g., when the named object was a stuffed animal), particularly when children had to consider both the familiar and the novel label for the object in the same session. Although not all alternative explanations have been ruled out, these results suggest that, from a very young age, children may spontaneously form language hierarchies when they hear a novel work for an object that already has a familiar name.     

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.     

Learning proper and common names in inferential versus ostensive contexts

A single, indirect exposure to a novel word provides information that could be used to make a fast mapping between the word and its referent, but it is not known how well this initial mapping specifies the function of the new word. The four studies reported here compare preschoolers' (N = 64) fast mapping of new proper and common names following an indirect exposure requiring inference with their learning of new names following ostension. In Study 1, 3-year-olds were shown an animate-inanimate pair of objects and asked to select, for example, Dax, a dax, or one. Children spontaneously selected an animate over an inanimate object as the referent for a novel proper name, but had no animacy preference in common name or baseline conditions. Next, the children were asked to perform actions on, for example, Dax or a dax, when presented with an array of three objects: the one they had just selected, another member of like kind, and a distracter. An indirectly learned proper name was treated as a marker for the originally selected object only, whereas a new common name was generalized to include the other category member. Study 2 showed that mappings made by inference were as robust as those made by ostension. Studies 3 and 4 demonstrated that even 2-year-olds can learn as much about the function of a new word from an indirect exposure as from ostension.     

The Principle of Mutual Exclusivity in Word Learning: To Honor or Not to Honor?

According to Markman and Wachtel, children assume that nouns pick out mutually exclusive object categories, and so each object should have only one category label. While this assumption can be useful in word learning, it is not entirely reliable. Therefore, children need to learn when to and when not to make this assumption. 6 studies examined whether knowledge about hierarchical organization of categories and about cross-language equivalents for object labels can help children limit their use of this assumption appropriately. These studies revealed that adults as well as children resisted assigning 2 novel names to the same object in some situations. By age 4, children also seemed to know enough about categorization to accept 2 names for an object if the names picked out categories from different levels of a hierarchy (e.g., animal and lemur) but not if they picked out categories from the same level (e.g., lemur and seal). Moreover, monolingual as well as bilingual children seemed to know enough about languages to accept 2 names for the same object if the names clearly came from different languages. Together, these findings suggest that even preschool children can make use of knowledge about language and categorization to fine tune the mutual exclusivity assumption in order to use it effectively in word learning.     

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.     

Children's attention to rigid and deformable shape in naming and non-naming tasks

In four experiments with three-year-olds (N = 67), we investigate children's understanding of the differential importance of shape for categorization of solid rigid objects with fixed shapes and solid but deformable objects with shapes that can be changed. In a non-naming task we find that young children categorize rigid and deformable things differently and know that material is important for deformable things and shape for rigid things. In two naming tasks, however, children generalize names for both solid and deformable objects by shape similarity and disregard rigidity. To understand this pattern of results we examine a corpus of early-learned nouns and the kinds of rigid and nonrigid things named by nouns in that corpus. The results suggest that names for categories of solid, rigid objects in which instances are similar in shape dominate children's early noun vocabularies. We suggest that children's novel word generalizations for deformable things may be overgeneralizations of this dominant pattern.     

Object Properties and Object Kind: Twenty-One-Month-Old Infants' Extension of Novel Adjectives

Three experiments examined the conditions under which infants acquiring English succeed in mapping novel adjectives, applied ostensively to individual objects, to other objects with the same property (color or texture). Twenty-one-month-old infants were introduced to a target (e.g., a yellow object) and asked to choose between (1) a matching test object (e.g., a different yellow object) and (2) a contrasting test object (e.g., a green object). Infants hearing the target labeled with novel adjectives were more likely than those hearing no novel words to choose the matching test object. Infants also revealed an emerging distinction between novel adjectives and nouns. Finally, infants' expectation regarding the extension of adjectives appears to unfold within the support of a familiar basic-level category. Infants extended novel adjectives to the matching test object when all objects were all drawn from the same basic level category; they failed to do so when the objects were drawn from different basic level categories.     

Semantic Constraints on Word Learning: Proper Names and Adjectives

4 experiments examined 3- and 4-year-olds' interpretations of novel words applied to familiar objects in the sentence frame, "This Y is X," where X is a novel word, and Y is a familiar basic-level count noun (e.g., "dog", "cup"). These novel words are ambiguous and could be interpreted either as proper names (e.g., "Fred") or as adjectives/mass nouns (e.g., "red"/"lead"). The experiments addressed 2 questions. First, do children appreciate that the words can be construed either as proper names referring to individuals or as adjectives/mass nouns referring to salient properties/material kinds? The results showed that children could easily make either interpretation. Second, what factors affect children's tendency to make either a proper name or an adjective/mass noun interpretation? In the experiments, children learned the novel words for a range of animals and artifacts. Most children who learned the words for typical pets (e.g., a bird) made proper name interpretations, as did the majority of those who learned the words for certain non-pet animals (e.g., a caterpillar) described as possessed by someone, but only about half of those who learned the words for such non-pet animals not so described. Very few children who learned the words for either simple (e.g., a shoe) or complex (e.g., a boat) artifacts made proper name interpretations. The results provide clear evidence of the role of semantic information in constraining children's interpretation of a novel word, and they help to refine an understanding of what counts as a nameable individual for preschoolers.     

A Horse of a Different Color: Specifying With Precision Infants' Mappings of Novel Nouns and Adjectives

A precisely controlled automated procedure confirms a developmental decalage: Infants acquiring English link count nouns to object categories well before they link adjectives to properties. Fourteen- and 18-month-olds ( n = 48 at each age) extended novel words presented as count nouns based on category membership rather than shared properties. When the same words were presented as adjectives, infants revealed no preference for either category- or property-based extensions. The convergence between performance in this automated procedure and in more interactive tasks is striking. Perhaps more importantly, the automated task provides a methodological foundation for (a) exploring the development of form–meaning links in infants acquiring languages other than English and (b) investigating the time course underlying infants' mapping of novel words to meaning.     

地名中方位词使用的地域不平衡性——基于涪陵地名的比较分析

用方位词为地理实体命名较为普遍．不同地区的方位地名呈现出较大的不平衡性：一是方位地名的构词方式不平衡。二是对方位词的使用频率不平衡。导致地名中方位词使用的不平衡性因素有客观地理环境的特征,有方位词本身标记方位的功能。还有方言词汇的影响。用方位词给地方命名的选择优先顺序可归纳为：上下〉东南西北〉前后〉里内外〉左右。     

Infants' use of lexical-category-to-meaning links in object individuation

Infants watched an experimenter retrieve a stuffed animal from an opaque box and then return it. This happened twice, consistent with either 1 animal appearing on 2 occasions or 2 identical-looking animals each appearing once. The experimenter labeled each object appearance with a different novel label. After infants retrieved 1 object from the box, their subsequent search behavior was recorded. Twenty-month-olds, but not 16-month-olds, searched significantly longer for a second object inside the box when the labels were both proper names than when they were 1 count noun followed by 1 proper name. The effect was not significant when proper names were replaced by adjectives. Twenty-month-olds' understanding of meaning distinctions among several word categories guided their object individuation.     

Three- to Four-Year-Old Children Rapidly Adapt Their Predictions and Use Them to Learn Novel Word Meanings

Adults create and update predictions about what speakers will say next. This study asks whether prediction can drive language acquisition, by testing whether 3- to 4-year-old children (n = 45) adapt to recent information when learning novel words. The study used a syntactic context which can precede both nouns and verbs to manipulate children's predictions about what syntactic category will follow. Children for whom the syntactic context predicted verbs were more likely to infer that a novel word appearing in this context referred to an action, than children for whom it predicted nouns. This suggests that children make rapid changes to their predictions, and use this information to learn novel information, supporting the role of prediction in language acquisition.     

Road or Lu, Is It Still a Question?—On Translation of Road and Street Names from the Perspective of Functional Theories

The translation of road names from Chinese into English applies no specific standards up to date. Whether the roads should be re ferred in accordance with the nearby position or some symbolic buildings or simply be represented by a phonetic pronunciation which has no specific meaning in English has provoked some heated discussion. In this paper I employ the skopos theory and other relevant theories to put forward a new perspective of translating road and street names, with same emphasis on that of generic name and on specific name. Some illustrations will be made on the defects of the writing standard set by relevant Chinese laws and regulations as well as resolutions of the United Nations Conference on the Standardization of Geographical Names, i.e. the adoption of a Single Romanization System, and Lu to be the generic name in China’s case. Also, I will further probe the existing translations of road and street names in major Chinese cities, most of which to be Road, either go against relevant laws or fail to inform foreign visitors. Finally, I will come up with the suggestion of ap plication of a combination of Lu and Road in translation of road and street names in accordance with functional approaches.     

Restricting a Familiar Name in Response to Learning a New One: Evidence for the Mutual Exclusivity Bias in Young Two-Year-Olds

Children under 2¹/₂ years old tend to interpret novel words in accordance with the Mutual Exclusivity Principle, but tend not to reinterpret familiar words this way. Because alternative principle have been proposed that only predict the novel word effects, and because tests of the familiar word effects may have been flawed, a new test was administered. In Experiment 1 ( N = 32), 24- to 25-month-olds heard stories in which a novel noun was used for an atypical exemplar of a familiar noun. When asked to select exemplars of the familiar noun, they showed a small but reliable tendency to avoid the object from the story. In Experiment 2 ( N = 16), the novel nouns in the stories were replaced by pronouns and proper names, and the children did not avoid the story object in the test of the familiar noun. Thus, the aversion to this object that was observed in Experiment I was not due to its greater exposure or its being referenced immediately before testing, but to toddlers' Mutual Exclusivity bias. Their bias is hypothesized to be a form of implicit probabilistic knowledge that derives from the competitive nature of category retrieval.     

Young Children''s Disambiguation of Object Name Reference

Children show a disambiguation effect--a tendency to select unfamiliar rather than familiar things as the referents of new names. In previous studies, this effect has been reversed in young 2-year-olds, but not older children, by preexposing the unfamiliar objects, suggesting that attraction to novelty controls 2-years-olds' choices of referents for new names, but a mutual exclusivity and/or lexical gap-filling principle determines preschoolers' selections. Both the disambiguation effect and its reversal by preexposure were replicated in the present study; however, 24-month-olds' rate of selecting unfamiliar over familiar kinds was less when they were simply asked to choose between the items than when they were asked to identify the referents of unfamiliar names. Thus, some young children may have both an attraction to novel tokens and a tendency to honor an abstract lexical principle. Referent selections were also affected by object typicality and word similarity. Correlations between the tendency to acknowledge a new name's unfamiliarity and to treat it like a similar-sounding familiar name suggested that youngsters' phonological matching skills affect their interpretation of new names. Also, 4-year-olds who most often mapped distinctive-sounding new names to unfamiliar kinds tended to admit their unfamiliarity with these names most frequently, suggesting that children's increasing awareness of their own knowledge begins to affect their lexical processing during the preschool years.     

从人称名词的演变看英语词汇的发展

从共时性和历时性两个方面研究英语中部分由人称名词演变而来的英语词汇的用法，我们可以看到，这些人称名词可分为以下几类：或由古希腊、罗马神话、《圣经》故事中的人名演变而来，或由小说、戏剧等文学、文艺作品中的人物名字演变而来，或由帝王将相、才子佳人演变而来，或由科学家、发明家、探险家、制造商等名人的名字演变而来。这些人称名词各有不同的用途和发展演变情况，反映了英语词汇发展变化非常迅速的一个侧面。