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Waxman, S.R. & Booth, A.E. (2001). Seeing pink elephants: Fourteen-month-olds’ interpretations of novel nouns and adjectives. Cognitive Psychology, 43, 217-242. Purpose Previous work has shown that infants learn to distinguish nouns from other forms of speech before they learn to map nouns to objects. By 9 months, infants begin to devote more attention to named objects than to those objects that remain unnamed. This has consequences for infants’ conceptual development because naming distinct objects with a common name (dogs, horses, and fish are all animals) highlights the similarities among the named entities. By 13 months, children can map novel count nouns onto categories and novel adjectives to properties. In doing so, children must attend to property-based and category-based commonalities for adjectives, and only category-based commonalities for nouns. This ability depends on infants’ realization that different types of words draw attention to different types of relations among objects. Some problems exist within this body of literature. One issue is that previous research has been based only on data from novelty preference tasks. Another concern is that the evidence that naming promotes attention to object categories has been documented with one set of materials while the link between naming and attention to object properties has been documented with another. This leaves the results open to several interpretations, such as infants simply finding some relations among objects more salient in some sets of materials than in others. Also, from the current literature, it is impossible to ascertain how novel words direct infants’ attention when the objects share more than a single dimension. This article sought to answer three questions: 1) can 14-month-old infants construe the same set of objects either as members of an object category or as embodying an object property 2) does naming influence these construals and 3) is it feasible to collect novelty-preference and word-extension data from children this young. Experimental Work Experiment 1: Forty-eight 14-month-old infants participated in a 2 (Word: Noun vs. Adjective) x 2 (Test: Category vs. Property) design experiment. There were three main phases of the experiment. First, children were familiarized either to four exemplars of objects which were the same color and from the same category (such as four purple horses) or to four different objects drawn from the same superordinate-level category (such as four different purple animals). The experimenter said, “These are blickets. This one is a blicket and this one is a blicket” for those children in the noun condition while in the adjective condition, children heard the same phases with the word blicket replaced by the word blickish. The second phase, the contrast phase, began with the experimenter presenting a new object drawn from a different object category and having a different object property (such as an orange carrot). In the noun condition, the experimenter said, “Uh oh! This one is not a blicket” while in the adjective condition, the experimenter said, “Uh oh! This one is not blickish”. The experimenter then brought back a familiarization object and said, “Yay, this one is a blicket/is blickish”. This phase of the experiment concluded with the experimenter asking the child to hand her a blicket or the blickish one, depending on the condition. During the final phase, children either received a category test or a property test. For the category test, children were presented with a familiar object and a novel object. For half of the children in each condition, this was a member of a novel object category, but had a familiar property (such as a purple plate). For the property test, the novel object was a member of the familiar object category, but the object now had a novel property (such as a blue horse). To test novelty preference, the experimenter placed the test pair in front of the infant and said, “Look at these” and looking times were measured accordingly. This was followed by a word extension test. Here, the experimenter presented a target object from the familiarization tests (purple horse for the noun condition or purple animal for the adjective condition) and said, “This one is a blicket/is blickish”. She then presented two test objects (purple horse vs. purple plate for category condition or purple horse vs blue horse for the property condition) and said, “Can you give me the blicket/the blickish one?” In the novelty-preference task, consistent with the prediction that infants hearing novel count nouns would attend to category-based rather than property-based commonalities among the objects, infants in the noun condition revealed a novelty preference on category trials but not on property trials. Infants in the adjective condition attended to both category- and property-based commonalities. In the word-extension task, infants were more likely to select the familiar test object on category trials than on property trials. Infants were more likely to extend nouns to the familiar test object on category trials than on property trials and were equally likely to extend adjectives to the familiar test object on category- and property-based trials. Children were also likely to consistently pick in this manner. By 14 months, naming was found to influence infants’ construal of the very same set of objects. This was the first time that infants’ expectations were measured reliably in word-extension as well as novelty-preference tasks. Experiment 2: This experiment investigated the same phenomenon using texture rather than color. The expectation was that performance in the noun condition would replicate Experiment 1, but that if a specific expectation linking adjectives to property-based commonalities emerged for both color and texture, then performance for adjectives in Experiment 1 and 2 should be the same. However, if a specific link for adjectives was more readily acquired for texture than for color, then infants may map adjectives specifically to property-based commonalities. Sixty-four 14-month-old infants participated in the same procedure as Experiment 1, with the objects now differing in texture rather than color. The results replicated the finding that by 14 months, naming influenced infants’ construal of the same set of objects (rough animals), either as members of a common object category (animals) or as instances of a common object property (rough things). In the novelty-preference task, the noun condition revealed reliable novelty preferences on category test trials only. This suggests that novel nouns direct infants’ attention specifically toward category-based commonalities. Infants in the adjective condition preferred both category and property test trials, consistent with the prediction that novel adjectives highlight both category- and property-based commonalities among objects. In the word-extension task, infants were more likely to extend nouns to the familiar test object on category trials than on property trials, but this extension was not found for adjectives (replicating Experiment 1). As for consistently picking the familiar object on both extension trials, infants in the noun condition were more likely to consistently select the familiar objects on category trials than on property trials. Infants in the adjective condition were more likely to consistently extend a novel adjective to the familiar test object on property trials than on category trials (does not replicate Experiment 1). Conclusions These experiments document the first time that infants’ expectations for novel words were found to not only influence their attention to objects in passive, novelty-preference tasks, but also to influence the extension of novel words to additional objects. These results also suggest that infants share an expectation with mature language users that different types of words will highlight different aspects of the very same set of objects. Points for Discussion Perhaps I’m missing something. The authors say, “Adjectives are predicated on the existence of a noun. If 14-month-olds are sensitive to this convention, then although the instructions in the adjective condition do not explicitly include a category name (a count noun), infants hearing novel adjectives might presuppose the existence of such a noun and as a consequence, might extend novel adjectival phrases to what a thing is and what property it embodies. On this account, infants should be unlikely to license the extension of adjectives beyond category- and property-based commonalities.” Are there other ways that infants or adults could extend adjectives? If you take category- and property- based commonalities out of the picture, what’s left? Since the children are showing a category-based preference in the noun condition and no preference at all in the adjective condition and because we know that children acquire nouns before other parts of speech, could it be that the children have no idea what an adjective is and that the authors are not getting an effect of noun vs. adjective, but of noun vs. “I have no idea what this word is or what part of speech it comes from” effect? If I showed an adult four different purple animals and said these are all blickish. How do they know that the word “blickish” refers to color instead of North American origin, or hoofed animals? Can the authors conclude that the children were attending to color or texture? Does it matter what they were attending to as long as it was an adjective of the grouping? |
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