Lisa Cantrell

Set size, individuation, and attention to shape.

Much research has demonstrated a shape bias in categorizing and naming solid objects. This research has shown that when an entity is conceptualized as an individual object, adults and children attend to the objects shape. Separate research in the domain of numerical cognition suggest that there are distinct processes for quantifying small and large sets of discrete items. This research shows that small set discrimination, comparison, and apprehension is often precise for 1-3 and sometimes 4 items; however, large numerosity representation is imprecise. Results from three experiments suggest a link between the processes for small and large number representation and the shape bias in a forced choice categorization task using naming and non-naming procedures. Experiment 1 showed that adults generalized a newly learned name for an object to new instances of the same shape only when those instances were presented in sets of less than 3 or 4. Experiment 2 showed that preschool children who were monolingual speakers of three different languages were also influenced by set size when categorizing objects in sets. Experiment 3 extended these results and showed the same effect in a non-naming task and when the novel noun was presented in a count-noun syntax frame. The results are discussed in terms of a relation between the precision of object representation and the precision of small and large number representation.

Early comprehension of the Spanish plural.

Understanding how linguistic cues map to the environment is crucial for early language comprehension and may provide a way for bootstrapping and learning words. Research has suggested that learning how plural syntax maps to the perceptual environment may show a trajectory in which children first learn surrounding cues (verbs, modifiers) before a full mastery of the noun morpheme alone. The Spanish plural system of simple codas, dominated by one allomorph -s, and with redundant agreement markers, may facilitate early understanding of how plural linguistic cues map to novel referents. Two-year-old Mexican children correctly identified multiple novel object referents when multiple verbal cues in a phrase indicated plurality as well as in instances when the noun morphology in novel nouns was the only indicator of plurality. These results demonstrate Spanish-speaking childrens ability to use plural noun inflectional morphology to infer novel word referents which may have implications for their word learning.

Set size and culture influence children's attention to number

Much research evidences a system in adults and young children for approximately representing quantity. Here we provide evidence that the bias to attend to discrete quantity versus other dimensions may be mediated by set size and culture. Preschool-age English-speaking children in the United States and Japanese-speaking children in Japan were tested in a match-to-sample task where number was pitted against cumulative surface area in both large and small numerical set comparisons. Results showed that children from both cultures were biased to attend to the number of items for small sets. Large set responses also showed a general attention to number when ratio difficulty was easy. However, relative to the responses for small sets, attention to number decreased for both groups; moreover, both U.S. and Japanese children showed a significant bias to attend to total amount for difficult numerical ratio distances, although Japanese children shifted attention to total area at relatively smaller set sizes than U.S. children. These results add to our growing understanding of how quantity is represented and how such representation is influenced by context--both cultural and perceptual.

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.