Susanne Grassmann

Two-year-olds exclude novel objects as potential referents of novel words based on pragmatics

Many studies have established that children tend to exclude objects for which they already have a name as potential referents of novel words. In the current study we asked whether this exclusion can be triggered by social-pragmatic context alone without pre-existing words as blockers. Two-year-old children watched an adult looking at a novel object while saying a novel word with excitement. In one condition the adult had not seen the object beforehand, and so the children interpreted the adults utterance as referring to the gazed-at object. In another condition the adult and child had previously played jointly with the gazed-at object. In this case, children less often assumed that the adult was referring to the object but rather they searched for an alternative referent--presumably because they inferred that the gazed-at object was old news in their common ground with the adult and so not worthy of excited labeling. Since this inference based on exclusion is highly similar to that underlying the Principle of Contrast/Mutual Exclusivity, we propose that this principle is not purely lexical but rather is based on childrens understanding of how and why people direct one anothers attention to things either with or without language.

Two-year-olds use primary sentence accent to learn new words*

German children aged 2;1 heard a sentence containing a nonce noun and a nonce verb (Der Feks miekt). Either the noun or the verb was prosodically highlighted by increased pitch, duration and loudness. Independently, either the object or the action in the ongoing referential scene was the new element in the situation. Children learned the nonce noun only when it was both highlighted prosodically and the object in the scene was referentially new. They did not learn the nonce verb in any condition. These results suggest that from early in linguistic development, young children understand that prosodic salience in a sentence indicates referential newness.

How two word-trained dogs integrate pointing and naming

Two word-trained dogs were presented with acts of reference in which a human pointed, named objects, or simultaneously did both. The question was whether these dogs would assume co-reference of pointing and naming and thus pick the pointed-to object. Results show that the dogs did indeed assume co-reference of pointing and naming in order to determine the reference of a spoken word, but they did so only when pointing was not in conflict with their previous word knowledge. When pointing and a spoken word conflicted, the dogs preferentially fetched the object by name. This is not surprising since they are trained to fetch objects by name. However, interestingly, in these conflict conditions, the dogs fetched the named objects only after they had initially approached the pointed-to object. We suggest that this shows that the word-trained dogs interpret pointing as a spatial directive, which they integrate into the fetching game, presumably assuming that pointing is relevant to finding the requested object.

Children’s level of word knowledge predicts their exclusion of familiar objects as referents of novel words

When children are learning a novel object label, they tend to exclude as possible referents familiar objects for which they already have a name. In the current study, we wanted to know if children would behave in this same way regardless of how well they knew the name of potential referent objects, specifically, whether they could only comprehend it or they could both comprehend and produce it. Sixty-six monolingual German-speaking 2-, 3-, and 4-year-old children participated in two experimental sessions. In one session the familiar objects were chosen such that their labels were in the children’s productive vocabularies, and in the other session the familiar objects were chosen such that their labels were only in the children’s receptive vocabularies. Results indicated that children at all three ages were more likely to exclude a familiar object as the potential referent of the novel word if they could comprehend and produce its name rather than comprehend its name only. Indeed, level of word knowledge as operationalized in this way was a better predictor than was age. These results are discussed in the context of current theories of word learning by exclusion.

Metaphors as Second Labels: Difficult for Preschool Children?

This study investigates the development of two cognitive abilities that are involved in metaphor comprehension: implicit analogical reasoning and assigning an unconventional label to a familiar entity (as in Romeo’s ‘Juliet is the sun’). We presented 3- and 4-year-old children with literal object-requests in a pretense setting (e.g., ‘Give me the train with the hat’). Both age-groups succeeded in a baseline condition that used building blocks as props (e.g., placed either on the front or the rear of a train engine) and only required spatial analogical reasoning to interpret the referential expression. Both age-groups performed significantly worse in the critical condition, which used familiar objects as props (e.g., small dogs as pretend hats) and required both implicit analogical reasoning and assigning second labels. Only the 4-year olds succeeded in this condition. These results offer a new perspective on young children’s difficulties with metaphor comprehension in the preschool years.