Hot dogs and zavy cats: Preschoolers’ and adults’ expectations about familiar and novel adjectives

Abstract

In recent years, a growing body of research has begun to examine the processes that underlie young children's acquisition of adjectival meanings. In the present studies, we examined whether preschoolers' willingness to extend adjectives was influenced by the type of property labeled by familiar adjectives (Experiment 1) and by semantic information conveyed in the sentence used to introduce novel adjectives (Experiment 2). In Experiment 1, we examined preschoolers' and adults' expectations about the generalizability of familiar adjectives of three different types: emotional state terms, physiological state terms, and stable trait terms. On each trial, we labeled a target animal with one of the three different types of adjectives and asked whether these terms could apply to a subordinate-level match, a basic-level match, a superordinate-level match, or an inanimate object. Results indicated that 4-year-olds and adults extended the trait terms, but not the emotional or physiological terms, to members of the same basic-level category. In Experiment 2, we presented 4-year-olds and adults with novel adjectives in one of two verb frames: stable ("This X is very daxy") or transient ("This X feels very daxy"). Participants were more likely to extend the novel adjective to subordinate matches if they were in the Stable frame group than if they were in the Transient frame group. These findings are discussed in terms of implications for young children's expectations about familiar and novel adjectives.

Preschoolers’ extension of familiar adjectives

“…Thus, it appears that the privileged status of basic-level categories, and not explicit linguistic information about an objectÕs basic-level kind, is what guides 4-year-oldsÕ and adultsÕ generalizations of trait adjectives. ChildrenÕs and adultÕs restriction of the familiar trait labels to members of the same basic-level category is consistent with other research documenting the critical role of basic-level categories in young childrenÕs interpretations of adjectives (e.g., Graham et al, 2003;Manders & Hall, 2002;. It is important to note that the basic-level phenomenon did not apply to the extension of the emotional and physiological adjectives, presumably because preschoolers appreciated that these adjectives labeled transient states as opposed to stable properties.…”

“…In summary, the current findings add to a large body of research documenting the importance of basic-level categories in guiding adjective acquisition and extension (e.g., Graham et al, 2003;Mintz & Gleitman, 2002) as well as object naming, categorization, and inductive inferences (for a detailed discussion of these issues, see Waxman, 1999a). Specifically, our experiments demonstrate that the privileged status of basic-level categories is primarily what guides preschoolersÕ extension of familiar trait adjectives.…”

“…First, we expected that children would be more willing to extend adjectives that label stable traits to members of the same basic-level category (i.e., the subordinate-level and basic-level matches) than to extend adjectives that label transient emotional and physiological states. That is, given that previous research has found that children treat adjectives as labeling enduring generalizable characteristics (Graham et al, 2003;Heyman & Gelman, 1998, we predicted that they would extend the trait adjectives across individuals in a given basic-level category. For example, if one Persian cat was characterized as gentle, children might reasonably expect that other Persian cats (and other cats in general) might also possess this trait.…”

“…In contrast, when children were told that a novel creature ''is feppy,'' they extended the label feppy to other creatures with similar salient surface textures. In a similar vein, Graham, Welder, and McCrimmon (2003) demonstrated that 4-year-olds can rely on linguistic information provided in a carrier sentence to determine whether a novel adjective can be extended from a target object to test objects. For example, when children were told that a German Shepherd ''is very daxy,'' they extended the label daxy to another German Shepherd.…”

“…In addition, research has demonstrated that basic-level categories and linguistic information both contribute to young childrenÕs acquisition of adjectival meanings (e.g., German et al, 2000;Graham et al, 2003). Although this research has provided several important insights into how young children acquire adjectival meanings, there are still many questions that remain largely unexplored.…”