Get Your Facts Right: Preschoolers Systematically Extend Both Object Names and Category-Relevant Facts

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Psychology
• Developmental Psychology
• Linguistics

Background:

• Toddlers systematically extend object labels to similarly shaped items.
• Research is inconclusive on whether children extend factual information to new category members.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate if young children extend factual information about an object to other category members.
• To contrast the extension of category-relevant versus category-irrelevant facts.

Main Methods:

• Three- to four-year-olds (N=61) learned either an object label, a category-relevant fact, or a category-irrelevant fact about a novel object.
• Children's systematic category extension was tested using two different tasks.

Main Results:

• Children who learned the object name or a category-relevant fact were significantly more likely to extend it to new category members.
• Children who learned a category-irrelevant fact showed significantly less category extension.

Conclusions:

• The findings suggest that children's extension of factual information is influenced by its relevance to the object's category.
• This supports the hypothesis that the mechanisms underlying word learning are domain-general.