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Related Experiment Videos

Early word meanings: perceptually or functionally based?

S A Tomikawa, D H Dodd

    Child Development
    |December 1, 1980
    PubMed
    Summary
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    Early word meaning in children relies on perceptual features, not functional ones. This study shows young children prioritize visual characteristics when learning new words for objects.

    Area of Science:

    • Developmental Psychology
    • Cognitive Science
    • Linguistics

    Background:

    • The basis of early word meaning (perceptual vs. functional features) remains debated.
    • Previous research has not definitively resolved whether children prioritize visual or functional attributes when learning words.

    Purpose of the Study:

    • To investigate whether young children's early word meanings are based on perceptual or functional features.
    • To determine the primary basis for word acquisition in 2- and 3-year-olds when these features are independently varied.

    Main Methods:

    • Children sorted novel objects with independently varying perceptual and functional features.
    • A concept-learning task involved learning nonsense labels for perceptually or functionally defined categories.
    • Experiments utilized both artificial and familiar objects to test categorization preferences.

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    Main Results:

    • Children consistently chose perceptual features when sorting novel objects.
    • Learning labels for functionally based categories was significantly more difficult than for perceptual categories.
    • Results were consistent across tasks and with both artificial and familiar objects.

    Conclusions:

    • Early conceptualizations and word meanings are primarily perceptually based.
    • When perceptual and functional features are independently available, children prioritize perceptual information in word learning.
    • This finding supports the perceptual basis of early word meaning development.