In two experiments the flexibility of 18-month-olds' extension of familiar object labels was investigated using the intermodal preferential looking paradigm. The first experiment tested whether infants consider intact and incomplete objects as equally acceptable referents for familiar labels. Infants looked equally long at the intact and incomplete objects whether or not a label was presented. In the second experiment, infants were requested to find the referent of a target word among an incomplete target and an intact distracter or an intact target and an incomplete distracter. The incomplete objects were missing a large or small part. Infants looked longer at the incomplete target, even when large or small parts were deleted. Taken together, these findings suggest that infants do not hold a strong shape bias when generalizing familiar words. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.Key words: labelling; object parts; shape bias; vocabulary; word comprehension Learning a word involves mapping a sound, such as the sound 'dog', onto a meaning, such as the concept of dog. A central issue is how children grasp the conditions underlying word extension, the understanding of, for instance, what is and what is not called dog. Children start producing words around the age of 12 months and have acquired a lexicon of about 50 words by the middle of their second year (Bloom, 1973;Dromi, 1987;Fenson et al., 1994). Once children reach the 50-word milestone in their lexicon, a rapid increase in vocabulary is observed, also called the vocabulary spurt, which contrasts with the slower rate of acquisition observed earlier (Benedict, 1979;Goldfield and Reznick, 1990;Poulin-Dubois et al., 1995b). Many explanations have been proposed for this spurt, including a linguistic insight, improved categorization skills, neurological maturation and the outcome of connectionist-type learning (

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A field study investigated the effect o f race and sex on helping behaviour. Four Asian (two males and two females) and four white English (two males and two females) requestors asked 205 white English subjects for change for a coin. Both male and female subjects displayed racial discrimination (against the Asian requestors) in same-sex encounters but not in opposite-sex encounters and the discussion considers this interaction between race. sex and helping. Racial discrimination was not related to the subject's social class but was characteristic of older (above 40 years) but not younger (below 40 years) subjects. 0144-6665/81/040285-08 W.OO/O@ 1981 The British Psychological Society of Personality and Social Psychology, 32,964970.Appleton-Century-Crofts.

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