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Two-year-olds will name artifacts by their functions.

D G Kemler Nelson1, R Russell, N Duke

  • 1Department of Psychology, Swarthmore College, PA 19081-1397, USA. dkemler1@swarthmore.edu

Child Development
|December 7, 2000
PubMed
Summary
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Young children utilize object function when learning new artifact names. Two-year-olds successfully extend these names based on function, even when discovering it independently.

Area of Science:

  • Cognitive Development
  • Developmental Psychology
  • Linguistics

Background:

  • Children's early word learning is crucial for cognitive development.
  • Understanding how children categorize objects informs theories of language acquisition.
  • The role of functional information in early lexical categorization is not fully understood.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To investigate whether young children incorporate functional information when learning and extending novel artifact names.
  • To determine if 2-year-olds can link an artifact's perceived structure to its function for naming.

Main Methods:

  • Three studies involved 112 two-year-old children learning novel names for novel artifacts.
  • Children were presented with artifacts whose functions were causally related to their physical structure.

Related Experiment Videos

  • Name generalization was assessed for new objects, with varying degrees of functional discovery by the children.

    • Main Results:

    • Children successfully generalized novel artifact names based on object function.
    • This functional generalization occurred even when children independently discovered the object's function.
    • The findings held true when all test objects possessed discernible functions.

    Conclusions:

    • Two-year-olds actively use functional information in artifact naming and lexical categorization.
    • Children's ability to name by function depends on their capacity to relate appearance to function.
    • This study highlights the sophisticated understanding of cause-effect relationships in early word learning.