The role of comparison in the extension of novel adjectives.

Abstract

Previous reseach has documented that basic-level object categories provide an initial foundation for mapping adjectives to object properties. Children ranging from 21 months to 3 years can successfully extend a novel adjective (e.g., transparent) to other objects sharing a salient property if the objects are all members of the same basic-level category; if the objects are members of different basic-level categories, they fail to extend adjectives systematically (R. S. Klibanoff & S. R. Waxman, 2000a; S. R. Waxman & D. B. Markow, 1998). The present study proposed that the process of comparison is instrumental in children's ability to move beyond this foundation. To promote comparison, 2 target objects were introduced to 3-year-olds. In Experiment 1, the targets had contrastive properties (e.g., 1 transparent and 1 opaque object); in Experiment 2, the targets had consistent properties (e.g., 2 transparent objects). The results of both experiments illustrate that comparison--a general psychological process--operates in conjunction with naming to support the extension of novel adjectives to properties of objects from diverse basic-level categories.

The company that words keep: comparing the statistical structure of child- versus adult-directed language

“…Though somewhat unsatisfying, this may be interpreted to support previous findings for both consistency (e.g. Brown, 2008 ;Waxman & Klibanoff, 2000) and contextual diversity (Hills et al, 2010). Future research will be needed to disentangle these variables.…”

“…low contextual diversity) across contexts has been shown to play an important role for learning verbs and adjectives (e.g. Brown, 2008 ;Waxman & Klibanoff, 2000). In principle, consistency may facilitate word learning among other word classes as well.…”

Comparison Facilitates Children's Learning of Names for Parts

“…Waxman and Klibanoff (2000; found that preschool children who first extended novel adjectives from a standard to highly similar items subsequently performed better than a baseline group at extending the adjectives to less similar items from a different category. Namy (1999, 2002) found that 4-year-olds who were given two highly similar standards (such as an apple and an orange) and encouraged to compare them were likely to extend a new noun label according to taxonomic category instead of to perceptual appearance (e.g., choosing a banana instead of a round balloon); in contrast, children who heard the new label applied to only one of the standards (just the orange) generally chose the perceptual match (the balloon).…”

Mutual bootstrapping between language and analogical processing

“…This in turn increases the likelihood that the child will subsequently be able to align the early examples with a further, less surface-similar instance of the same relational structure. Many studies have borne out these predictions (Gentner et al in press;Gentner et al 2007;Kotovsky and Gentner 1996;Loewenstein and Gentner 2001;Namy and Gentner 2002;Thompson and Opfer, in press;Waxman and Klibanoff 2000). We exemplify progressive alignment below.…”