William E. Merriman

An appearance-function shift in children's object naming.

The relative importance of appearance and potential function in childrens object naming was examined. Potential function is an object capability that may not be currently realized (e.g. an empty mug has the potential to hold coffee). In Study 1, sixteen children from each of three age groups (3;8, 4;8, and 6;1) were taught novel names for unfamiliar objects; they then had to decide whether these applied to items that resembled the training objects in either appearance or potential function. The youngsters were also shown deceptive objects (e.g., an eraser that looked like a pencil) and had to choose between familiar appearance and function names for them (e.g., pencil or eraser). The frequency of function-based responding in both tasks increased with age. In Study 2, the name training procedure was revised so that equal emphasis was given to both apparent and functional features. The main results of the first study were replicated. Neither study obtained evidence of a strong relation between the appearance-function shift and increased understanding of the appearance-reality distinction.

The effect of bilingualism on cognitive ability: A test of the level of bilingualism hypothesis

Does bilingualism facilitate the development of cognitive abilities, and if so, how? According to the level of bilingualism hypothesis (Diaz, 1983), only in the early stages of second language acquisition does bilingualism foster cognitive ability. This hypothesis was tested on a sample of 3rd and 4th grade Mexican Spanish-English bilinguals with low English proficiency. Knowledge of Spanish and English in phonology, vocabulary, and syntax was measured. Nonverbal general intelligence was assessed with the Raven Colored Progressive Matrices, and verbal intelligence was assessed with a subtest of the Woodcock Language Proficiency Battery. No relationship was found between degree of bilingualism and nonverbal intelligence, contrary to the level of bilingualism hypothesis. The results suggest that the effects of bilingualism on cognitive development are not solely dependent on the level of second language proficiency.

How Young Children Judge Whether a Word Is One They Know: A Dual Criterion Account.

Word familiarity judgment may be important for word learning, yet little is known about how children make this judgment. We hypothesized that preschool-age children differ in the judgment criteria that they use and that this difference derives from individual differences in basic memory processes. Those who have superior phonological working memory, but who retrieve less semantic information than their peers, base the judgment on whether they recognize a words sound form. Those who show the opposite memory profile base the judgment on whether they retrieve a words meaning. The results of two studies of 3- and 4-year-olds were consistent with these claims. Among those performing poorly on one memory measure, judgment accuracy was directly related to performance on the other memory measure. These memory-judgment relations were also found to be highly specific. This is the first investigation to demonstrate the usefulness of an individual differences approach for identifying relations between linguistic judgment processes and basic memory processes during early childhood.

Rate of Forgetting in Early Childhood

The relation between age and rate of forgetting was investigated with a task that eliminated differences in level of initial learning. Three-, four-, and six-year-olds were shown 40 pictures, then were tested for their recognition of 20 pictures immediately, followed by a recognition test of all pictures 24 hours later. Rate of forgetting was nearly identical in every age group. The results are discussed in terms of the interference theory of forgetting and hypotheses about the relation of forgetting to neurological maturation.

Knowledge Judgments and Object Memory Processes in Early Childhood: Support for the Dual Criterion Account of Object Nameability Judgment.

According to the dual criterion account of early linguistic judgment (Merriman & Lipko, 2008), preschool-aged children who possess more efficient object memory processes should also be more accurate judges of whether various objects have known names. In support of this claim, both the accuracy of object recognition and the speed of object naming were found to be correlated with the accuracy of object nameability judgments, but not with the accuracy of four other mentalistic judgments. Nameability judgments tended to be as accurate as judgments of word familiarity and judgments of the relation between seeing and knowing. These three judgments tended to be more accurate than false-belief judgments.

Two-year-olds' expectation that lexical gaps will be filled*

Children tend to select unfamiliar rather than familiar kinds as the referents of novel names. This tendency has been hypothesized by some to derive from an expectation that unfamiliar kinds will be labelled. In Study 1, two-year-olds (N = 16) showed little evidence of such an expectation when they had to decide whether a visible picture of an unfamiliar object or a depicted object concealed in a box was the referent of a novel name. They tended to check the box before making a selection. This test was preceded by two tasks, the first requiring the same type of decision about familiar names and the second highlighting the status of unfamiliar objects as ‘new kinds of things’. In Study 2 (N = 16), the latter task was replaced by one in which toddlers had to decide whether unfamiliar kinds were more likely than familiar kinds to be the referents of novel names. After this experience, participants showed a moderately strong expectation that unfamiliar kinds would be labelled. In Study 3 (N = 60) this finding was replicated. In two other conditions, the task that preceded the test was replaced with direct teaching of novel names for unfamiliar kinds. These groups showed little expectation that lexical gaps would be filled. Although results are compatible with a restricted form of the lexical gap filling hypothesis, they do not support the broad form that has been advanced by some theorists.

Children's strategic compensation for size underconstancy: Dependence on distance and relation to reasoning ability

When asked to judge the size of a distant object, older children are more likely than younger ones to report deliberately inflating their judgements to compensate for size underconstancy (Granrud, in press). The current investigation examined whether use of this strategy depends on object distance and whether it is related to individual differences in reasoning, knowledge about size perception, or cognitive style. In two studies, children in Grades 1–3 estimated the size of a distant (61 m away) and near (6.1 m away) disc. In each, half of the children reported inflating their judgement of the distant disc to compensate for a tendency to underestimate its size, but only a few reported using this strategy for the near disc. Self-reported strategy users tended to either judge the distant disc accurately or to overestimate its size, whereas the other children tended to underestimate its size. Strategy reporters obtained higher scores on a test of verbal reasoning, but did not differ from the other children in reflectivity-impulsivity. In Study 1, strategy reporters also showed a better understanding of how distance affects the apparent size of objects in photographs. This understanding was strongly related to verbal reasoning ability. In Study 2, visuospatial reasoning ability was also found to predict who would report strategy use, and this predictive relation was independent of verbal reasoning ability.

Preexposure to Objects that Contrast in Familiarity Improves Young Children’s Lexical Knowledge Judgment

ABSTRACT The ability to judge the limits of one’s own knowledge may play an important role in knowledge acquisition. The current study tested the prediction that preschoolers would judge the limits of their lexical knowledge more accurately if they were first exposed to a few objects of contrasting familiarity. Such preexposure was hypothesized to increase the salience of the metacognitive experiences that distinguish known from unknown kinds. These experiences include both the feeling of familiarity that a kind evokes and the amount of information about the kind that is retrieved spontaneously. In Experiment 1, 3- and 4-year-olds performed a matching task involving familiar and unfamiliar objects, then made lexical knowledge judgments about both objects and words. The accuracy of these judgments was predicted to exceed that of children who had not performed a matching task (Experiment 1) or who had performed one involving wooden blocks (Experiment 1) or only familiar objects (Experiment 2). This prediction was supported for children with vocabulary sizes typical of a younger 4-year-old but not for children with larger vocabularies. Additional analyses suggested that the primary source of error in the former group was insensitivity to both feeling of familiarity and amount of information retrieval. In contrast, the occasional errors made by the children with the larger vocabularies were likely due to lapses in executive control.

The effect of a tactile-to-visual shift on young children’s tendency to map novel labels onto novel objects

When taught a label for an object and then asked whether an exemplar of that object or a novel object is the referent of a novel label, children favor the novel object. Preschool-aged children tend not to show this so-called disambiguation effect, however, when the test objects are presented in a different sense modality than the original object. The current experiments used a touch-to-vision paradigm to test two explanations for this unexpected pattern. Experiment 1 asked whether children might fail to retrieve the original label and found that additional label training benefitted 3-year-olds but not 4-year-olds. Experiments 2 and 3 asked whether childrens reaction to discovering the cross-modal match might interfere with how they process the request for the novel label and found that being allowed to share their discovery of the match benefitted 4-year-olds but not 3-year-olds. These findings support the proposal that the chief obstacle to cross-modal disambiguation changes during early childhood from difficulty in retrieving the known label to disruption caused by the discovery of the cross-modal match.

The metacognitive disambiguation effect

ABSTRACT From an early age, children show a tendency to map novel labels onto unfamiliar rather than familiar kinds of objects. Accounts of this tendency have not addressed whether children develop a metacognitive representation of what they are doing. In 3 experiments (each N = 48), preschoolers received a test of the metacognitive disambiguation effect, which involved deciding whether the referent of a novel label was located in a bucket of things “I know” or bucket of things “I don’t know.” Most 4-year-olds passed this test, whereas most 3-year-olds did not. Children’s performance was predicted by their ability to report whether various words and pseudowords were ones that they knew, even after age and vocabulary size were controlled. As children develop an awareness of their lexical knowledge/ignorance, they also develop a metacognitive representation of their tendency to map novel labels onto unfamiliar rather than familiar kinds.