Erin R. Hahn

Children and Adults Learn Actions for Objects More Readily Than Labels

Researchers tend to investigate word learning and action learning as separate and independent developments. Recently, however, a growing body of evidence suggests that underlying both labels and actions are parallel processes tightly coordinated with perceptual and motor functions. The present research addresses the nature of this developmental relation in the context of learning about objects. In three studies, children and adults were trained to map novel names and arbitrary actions to a set of unfamiliar objects. Receptive and productive knowledge were assessed. Two main findings emerged. First, participants of all ages learned actions more readily than labels. Second, the relationship between understanding and producing varied as a function of condition. The results suggest that actions are more accessible in memory than labels. Findings are interpreted within an embodied cognition framework according to which sensorimotor states form the basis of object concepts throughout development.

The shape-bias in Spanish-speaking children and its relationship to vocabulary.

Considerable research has demonstrated that English-speaking children extend nouns on the basis of shape. Here we asked whether the development of this bias is influenced by the structure of a childs primary language. We tested English- and Spanish-speaking children between the ages of 1 ; 10 and 3 ; 4 in a novel noun generalization task. Results showed that English learners demonstrated a robust shape-bias, whereas Spanish learners did not. Further, English-speaking children produced more shape-based nouns outside the laboratory than Spanish-speaking children, despite similar productive vocabulary sizes. We interpret the results as evidence that attentional biases arise from the specifics of the language environment.

Labels affect preschoolers' tool-based scale errors.

Scale errors offer a unique context in which to examine the interdependencies between language and action. Here, we manipulated the presence of labels in a tool-based paradigm previously shown to elicit high rates of scale errors. We predicted that labels would increase childrens scale errors with tools by directing attention to shape, function, and category membership. Children between the ages of 2 and 3years were introduced to an apparatus and shown how to produce its function using a tool (e.g., scooping a toy fish from an aquarium using a net). In each of two test trials, children were asked to choose between two novel tools to complete the same task: one that was a large non-functional version of the tool presented in training and one novel functional object (different in shape). A total of four tool-apparatus sets were tested. The results indicated that without labels, scale errors decreased over the two test trials. In contrast, when labels were present, scale errors remained high in the second test trial. We interpret these findings as evidence that linguistic cues can influence childrens action-based errors with tools.