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Pragmatically natural assessment of novel and familiar nouns
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PRAGMATICALLY NATURAL ASSESSMENT OF NOVEL AND FAMILIAR NOUNS Alison Hauser’, Rosa Arriaga*, and Susan Carey3 ‘Department of Child Development, Tufts University, Medford MA 02143 *Department of Psychology, Harvard University, Cambridge MA 02138 3Department of Psychology, New York University, New York, NY 10003 The goal of this experiment was to assess labeling of familiar and novel objects. Researchers have postulated many theories on how infants engage in lexical acquisition. However, a disagreement exists concerning children’s use of induction in lexical acquisition. Some researchers say that constraint and principle theories such as the principle of contrast begin to exist only when children are approximately two to four years of age. These researchers have felt that children could not induce word meaning before the event of the vocabulary spurt. Other researchers have suggested that constraints, in part, facilitate the vocabulary spurt; therefore, children use constraints prior to the age of two years. This experiment used a pragmatically natural procedure to investigate if 14month-olds were able to use the mutual exclusivity constraint to allocate novel labels to novel objects. Ten males and 11 females from 13.5 to 14.5 months were presented with two objects on opposite sides of a stage. In 2 familiarization trials, infants saw 2 of 3 objects parents rated as being highly familiar to their child. Infants were asked to look at one of the two objects in infant-directed speech. The procedure was the same for test trials except a familiar and a novel object were now on stage and infants were asked to look at each alternately in 6 pairs of trials. An order effect was found for test trials regarding the initial presentation of the familiar or novel object (p c.05). Data was split on this factor beginning at test trails. Infants looked significantly above chance at familiar objects in familiarization trials and both conditions of test trials (p e.05) and did not look significantly at novel objects regardless of order condition. These results suggest that the pragmatically natural paradigm is an effective test of familiar label comprehension. The effect of order result indicates that a familiar object context may be necessary for infants to associate novel labels to their referents. At least in this condition the results seem to indicate the use of induction-like faculties in infants prior to the vocabulary spurt.
PRAGMATICALLY NATURAL ASSESSMENT OF NOVEL AND FAMILIAR NOUNS Alison Hauser’, Rosa Arriaga*, and Susan Carey3 ‘Department of Child Development, Tufts University, Medford MA 02143 *Department of Psychology, Harvard University, Cambridge MA 02138 3Department of Psychology, New York University, New York, NY 10003 The goal of this experiment was to assess labeling of familiar and novel objects. Researchers have postulated many theories on how infants engage in lexical acquisition. However, a disagreement exists concerning children’s use of induction in lexical acquisition. Some researchers say that constraint and principle theories such as the principle of contrast begin to exist only when children are approximately two to four years of age. These researchers have felt that children could not induce word meaning before the event of the vocabulary spurt. Other researchers have suggested that constraints, in part, facilitate the vocabulary spurt; therefore, children use constraints prior to the age of two years. This experiment used a pragmatically natural procedure to investigate if 14month-olds were able to use the mutual exclusivity constraint to allocate novel labels to novel objects. Ten males and 11 females from 13.5 to 14.5 months were presented with two objects on opposite sides of a stage. In 2 familiarization trials, infants saw 2 of 3 objects parents rated as being highly familiar to their child. Infants were asked to look at one of the two objects in infant-directed speech. The procedure was the same for test trials except a familiar and a novel object were now on stage and infants were asked to look at each alternately in 6 pairs of trials. An order effect was found for test trials regarding the initial presentation of the familiar or novel object (p c.05). Data was split on this factor beginning at test trails. Infants looked significantly above chance at familiar objects in familiarization trials and both conditions of test trials (p e.05) and did not look significantly at novel objects regardless of order condition. These results suggest that the pragmatically natural paradigm is an effective test of familiar label comprehension. The effect of order result indicates that a familiar object context may be necessary for infants to associate novel labels to their referents. At least in this condition the results seem to indicate the use of induction-like faculties in infants prior to the vocabulary spurt.