Early World Learning

Waxman, Sandra R.; Lidz, Jeffrey

doi:10.1002/9780470147658.chpsy0207

Cited by 63 publications

(95 citation statements)

References 246 publications

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“…If children had no insight into the existence of generic categories, they would presumably treat all nouns as roughly equivalent to proper names (e.g., "dog" would only refer to the originally named instance). However, although children undoubtedly possess categories even before they learn language, and although implicit categories underlie children's use of specific reference (e.g., Waxman & Lidz, 2006), these facts do not demonstrate that children have access to a concept of dogs-in-general, to which they can refer explicitly.…”

Section: How Are Generics Learned?mentioning

confidence: 96%

Generic Language in Parent-Child Conversations

Gelman

Goetz

Sarnecka

et al. 2008

Language Learning and Development

107

124

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Generic knowledge concerns kinds of things (e.g., birds fly; a chair is for sitting; gold is a metal). Past research demonstrated that children spontaneously develop generic knowledge by preschool age. The present study examines when and how children learn to use the multiple devices provided by their language to express generic knowledge. We hypothesize that children assume, in the absence of specifying information or context, that nouns refer to generic kinds, as a default. Thus, we predict that (a) Children should talk about kinds from an early age. (b) Children should learn generic forms with only minimal parental scaffolding. (c) Children should recognize a variety of different linguistic forms as generic. Results from longitudinal samples of adult-child conversations support all three hypotheses. We also report individual differences in the use of generics, suggesting that children differ in their tendency to form the abstract generalizations so expressed.Generic concepts-concepts of general kinds of things (e.g., dogs in general)-are central to human reasoning. The capacity to think about kinds as distinct from individuals underlies our abilities to make novel inferences (Prasada, 2000), explain regularities (Prasada & Dillingham, 2006), and reason about individuation and numerical identity (Carey & Xu, 1999;Macnamara, 1986;Needham & Baillargeon, 2000). Generic concepts are expressed with generic noun phrases. In English, generic noun phrases (hereafter referred to as "generics") can appear in any of a variety of forms, including bare plurals (e.g., "Knives are dangerous"), indefinite singulars (e.g., "A dog has four legs"), and mass nouns (e.g., "Gold is valuable"). 1 What they all have in common is that they refer to kinds rather than individuals (Carlson & Pelletier, 1995;Lyons, 1977 1 Generics are not limited to these forms, as they can also be expressed with a definite singular noun ("The stegosaurus is extinct"), a definite article plus adjective ("The elderly need better health care"), a bare singular ("Peace on earth, good will to man"), and even a definite plural ("The Sioux Indians are a proud people."). NIH Public Access Author ManuscriptLang Learn Dev. Author manuscript; available in PMC 2011 July 15. to the category of apples, rather than any particular apple or group of apples. Indeed, some properties are true only of a category, and not of any individual, such as "Dinosaurs are extinct" or "Rabbits are numerous."The present study addresses two key questions: How do children learn to use the devices provided by their language to express generic knowledge? And how content-specific is generic usage? We examine these questions by analyzing natural language data in detail. Doing so allows us to examine the earliest uses of generics, and to test competing models of how generics are learned. This, in turn, allows us to understand better how young children think about kinds.

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Section: How Are Generics Learned?mentioning

confidence: 96%

Generic Language in Parent-Child Conversations

Gelman

Goetz

Sarnecka

et al. 2008

Language Learning and Development

107

124

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show abstract

“…Waxman & Lidz, 2002), little is known about infants' ability to form their first word-to-world mappings, or about the interplay between the three vital vocabulary construction processes. There have been only a few experimental studies testing lexicalsemantic knowledge of infants younger than 12 months, using the intermodal preferential-looking paradigm (IPL) (Bergelson & Swingley, 2012;Schafer, 2005;Tincoff & Jusczyk, 1999.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Thus vocabulary construction has started well before it is so evident in production. Vocabulary construction requires infants to show at least three skills: identifying a concept (categorization), identifying a word (recognizing words in a speech stream), and mapping words to objects or events (word-to-world mapping; Waxman & Lidz, 2002).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Electrophysiological evidence of early word learning

2012

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a b s t r a c tAround their first birthday infants begin to talk, yet they comprehend words long before. This study investigated the event-related potentials (ERP) responses of nine-month-olds on basic level pictureword pairings. After a familiarization phase of six picture-word pairings per semantic category, comprehension for novel exemplars was tested in a picture-word matching paradigm. ERPs timelocked to pictures elicited a modulation of the Negative Central (Nc) component, associated with visual attention and recognition. It was attenuated by category repetition as well as by the type-token ratio of picture context. ERPs time-locked to words in the training phase became more negative with repetition (N300-600), but there was no influence of picture type-token ratio, suggesting that infants have identified the concept of each picture before a word was presented. Results from the test phase provided clear support that infants integrated word meanings with (novel) picture context. Here, infants showed different ERP responses for words that did or did not align with the picture context: a phonological mismatch (N200) and a semantic mismatch (N400). Together, results were informative of visual categorization, word recognition and word-to-world-mappings, all three crucial processes for vocabulary construction.

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“…Children's early productive vocabularies are dominated by nouns, and infant comprehension of object names appears earlier than comprehension of relational terms (Fisher 2002;Gentner & Boroditsky 2001;Gleitman 1993;Waxman & Lidz 2006). Although it has been argued that early noun dominance is not universal cross-linguistically, the evidence for this is still weaker than the evidence against it (Gentner & Boroditsky 2001;Gopnik 2000).…”

mentioning

confidence: 71%

“…Asümmeetria on P/A struktuuri sisemine omadus (Hurford 2003c 2. Laste varases produktiivses sõnavaras domineerivad nimisõnad ja laste arusaamine objektinimedest eelneb nende arusaamisele seoseid väljendavatest mõistetest (Fisher 2002;Gentner & Boroditsky 2001;Gleitman 1993;Waxman & Lidz 2006). Kuigi on väidetud, et nimisõnade varane domineerimine pole keelteüleselt universaalne, on tõendid selle poolt nõrgemad kui tõendid selle vastu (Gentner & Boroditsky 2001;Gopnik 2000).…”

Section: Nimisõna/verbunclassified

The noun/verb and predicate/argument structures

Luuk

2009

Lingua

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Early World Learning

Cited by 63 publications

References 246 publications

Generic Language in Parent-Child Conversations

Generic Language in Parent-Child Conversations

Electrophysiological evidence of early word learning

The noun/verb and predicate/argument structures

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