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Development of decontextualization in object naming
Cognitive Development, 4, 389-405 (1989)
Development of Decontextualization in Object Naming M,~rten Eriksson Uppsala University
The first experiment in this paper investigated the influence of the environmental context on the naming practices of children for common objects. The answers of 70 children (2-6 years) to questions regarding 10 pairs of pictures were analyzed. One of the pictures in a pair showed a common object in an appropriate context, while the other showed the same object in an inappropriate context. The results showed that the environmental context affected the naming practices of children for common objects, sometimes to such a high degree that it dominated the perceptual appearance of the object. This effect was about the same for the ages 2-5 years, but significantly lower for the 6-year-olds. Adults' performance on the same task was studied in a second experiment, and was found to be about the same as for the 6-year-olds. The validity of the material was tested in a third experiment and was found to be satisfactory. The results were interpreted as a support for Nelson's functional theory of concept formation, both regarding the importance of the functional relationships in wh~rh nbjects take part, as well as to the age of when decontextualization of these *,arms are to be expected.
This study is concerned with object naming and object concepts. It is directed at the question of whether these are decontextualized during the course of language development. The term decontextualization implies that the early language forms of children are first embedded in specific contexts. The words refer to these contexts in a more or less undifferentiated way, and later become differentiated and available for general use. The notion that child language normally decontextualizes over age is old, Suggested by such authors as Luria and Yudovich (1959) and Werner and Kaplan (1963) among others. This theme also plays a crucial role in the more recent
This paper was based on part of the author's doctoral dissertation.I wish to thank Berndt Brehmer for his generous help and support of this work. I a m also grateful to the staffof the preschools, to the parents and children for theircooperation, to Anna Karin van Haaver for painting the pictures,and to Gunnar Jansson for comments on a draftof thisarticle.A poster based on thisresearch was presented at the Third European Conference on Developmental Psychology, Budapest, June 1988. Correspondence and requests for reprints should be sent to M~u'ten Eriksson, Department of Psychology, Uppsala University, Box 1854, S-751 04 Uppsala, Sweden.
Manuscript received August 10, 1988; revision accepted January 13, 1989
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M~Irlen Eriksson
functional theory of concept formation and lexical acquisition proposed by Nelson. However, in emphasizing that "words mean in context," Nelson herself prefers a formulation in terms of extension of meaning from one particular context of use, to m a n y I " e v e n t u a l l y all possible contexts" (Nelson, 1985, p. 60). The present study of decontextualization was performed in relation to her writings (primarily, Nelson, 1973, 1974, 1979, 1985). As opposed to the traditional assumptions of concept fornaation, Nelson does not consider this as a process of abstracting necessary and sufficient sensory attributes from a proper group of referents. She argues instead that it is the functional aspects of the referents that are essential. It is these functional relationships that are extended across different situations. A somewhat harsh formulation of this would be to say that it is the referents' functional relationships that are "defining" for the concept. (Nelson does not deny that perceptual attributes are important in a concept identification task, but their status is more accidental, though often highly correlated.) If the functional relationships in which a thing takes part are essential for the formation of the concept of the thing, at least for the young child, how would a child then name a well-known thing in a new and somewhat absurd functional relationship, that is, well-known in its usual relationship and absurd in the sense that these functions are usually performed by other things? That is the first problem assessed in this study. It is argued here that if children give a name suggested by the new functional relationships, such a phenomenon would be a clear case of a non-decontextualized concept. It is through the context that such functional relationships are mediated. Furthermore, if children give such a name to things in new functional relationships, this would also support the functional theory of concept formation as proposed by Nelson. If the object namings of young children are found to be context-bound, then the second problem concerns at what age in the child's development a decontextualization of very simple object terms begins. Nelson also gives some clues about this. It is seen in her description of the development of the cognitive representational system of meaning (Nelson, 1985, preliminary version 1979). Nelson described this system in a model consisting of three phases appearing in the lbllowing order: the prelexical, the conceptual, and the semantic. In the prelexical, the child acquires event-representations of familiar events. However, these representations are holistic, and the words of children in this phase refer to whole events or are uttered within the events. This phase extends to about the age of 18 months. In the conceptual phase, a partition between concept-specific information and contextual-episodic material takes place. Here, the child also begins to relate concepts to each other, and to exchange meanings with others. This phase extends until about the age of 5 years. In the semantic phase, the child has loosened the bindings between the word and the concepts, and is also able to establish hierarchical relationships among concepts. Further, the child can now start "to think in language about language"--this being a requirement for learning word meaning from language.
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Thus, according to Nelson, the context-dependence of the child's namings is a consequence of the concepts' foundations in event-representations. We can further conclude that this context-dependence should decrease drastically at the end of the conceptual phase, in which the bindings between the word and the concept are loosened. Hence, a prediction from Nelson's (1985) model is that the object namings of children should be decontextualized at about the age of 6. EXPERIMENT 1
This study investigated whether the early namings of children are context-bound, and whether the age of the children matters in this respect. A major problem in studying the effects of context is that the term context is both complex and vague. One common way to decrease this ambiguity is to restrict the study to the linguistic context. Another way, followed here, is to focus on the influence of the physical environment (or milieu) in which a certain concept appears. The contexts were especially chosen to emphasize two of the four aspects of function specified by Nelson (1979, 1985): action on things, and conventional uses of things. The names studied were names for concrete common nouns, or "names for things you may bump into" to use Macnamara's (1982) words to avoid the problematic definition of what constitutes a concrete common noun. Method
Subjects. Seventy children participated in the experiment. They were divided into five age groups with 14 children in each. A description of the subjects is given in Table 1. Thirty-two of the children lived in the city of Uppsala, and 38 of them in smaller villages. The children were tested in a familiar environment, which means at their preschool (60), in their homes (8), or in a friend's home (2). None of the children had started elementary school, t Materials. The material consisted of 10 pairs of drawings (28 cm x 39 cm) painted by an artist given specific instructions. In every pair, one member consisted of a common object in an appropriate context (called A picture), and the other member consisted of the same object in an inappropriate context (called B picture). The 10 critical objects (underlined in the descriptions) were: toothbrush, flower, school-bag, balloon, dice, pencil, shoe, policeman, hot dog, and clock. The pictures were selected as to be probable scenes in event-representations familiar to the children. They were as follows. IA.
A boy is standing in front of the washbasin in a bathroom and is about to brush his teeth. His mouth is open. He is holding the toothbrush in one hand and the toothpaste in the other.
I Children do not normallystart elementaryschool in Sweden before the age of 7.
M/trten Eriksson
392 Table 1. Age Group (years) 2 3 4 5 6
IB.
2A. 2B.
3A.
3B.
4A.
4B. 5A. 5B.
6A. 6B
7A.
Characteristics of the Subjects in Experiment 1 City (C)/ Village (V)
Mean Age
Sex
Range
n
(months)
(months)
F
M
C
V
14 14 14 14 14
30 44 54 65 78
24-35 41-47 49-59 60-71 73-82
4 7 10 7 8
l0 7 4 7 6
7 7 7 4 7
7 7 7 10 7
A girl is sitting at a desk, painting in water-color. In front of her is a halffinished painting, water-colors, papers, and pencils. The instrument she is working with on the paper is a toothbrush. Some children are picking flowers in a green summer field. Theflowers are plentiful. A family of four is sitting at the dinner table. The table is set with plates, glasses, silverware, deep-dishes, and shakers of salt and pepper. The plate in front of each person is full of potatoes and flowers. A classroom scene at the end of the day. A map of the world can be seen in the background. The children are about to leave the classroom. They are all carrying blue school-bags. A mother is about to read a goodnight story to her son in the child's bedroom. She is holding the book in her hand. Several toys can be seen on the floor. The boy is lying in bed. Under his head is a blue school-bag. Four children are sitting at a table enjoying a cake with five candles. It is a birthday party. Balloons and streamers can be seen everywhere. A woman is holding a pitcher of red punch. Two men in white clothes are playing tennis. They have rackets in their hands. In the air, over the net, is a red balloon. Two girls and a boy are sitting at a table playing a dice game. A board is on the table, and one of the girls has just thrown the dice. Two teams are playing football on a field. A team with green shirts are attacking. One can also see the back of three spectators. The players are kicking a very large black and white dice. A girl is sitting at a desk, writing a letter. She is holding a yellow pencil in her hand. A vase with a red rose can also be seen at the desk. A woman, wearing an apron, is working in the kitchen. The oven door is open. The woman is holding a baking-plate in her hands. The plate is full of yellow pencils. A boy is sitting on the floor in an almost empty room, putting on his
shoes. 7B.
One adult woman and two children are picking blue shoes from a tree. One child is using a ladder. They are putting the shoes in baskets.
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8B.
9A.
393
A uniformed policeman with a raised baton is running after a thief. The thief is wearing striped clothes and looks very unshaven. He is carrying a brown sack on his back. A room-interior with a decorated Christmas tree and many lit candles. There is also a fire in the fireplace. Under the Christmas tree are some Christmas presents waiting. Four very expectant children are looking at the door the father is opening. In the doorway is a policeman. A child is sitting at a table with a plate full of mashed potatoes and hot
dogs. 9B. 10A. 10B.
A boy is standing in a bathroom, turning on the hot water tap. To the right on the washbasin, in the place of the soap, there is a hot dog. A clock is hanging on the wall in an almost empty room. A man is driving a red tractor on a field. In the place of the left rear wheel is a clock-face.
See Figure 1 for some examples of these pictures.
Procedure. All the children were tested individually by the author. In the cases of the youngest children, a parent or some other well-known caretaker was present. The testing lasted for 15-30 minutes. The drawings were shown to the child one at a time. The child was asked the content of the picture. If the child only said a few words or did not mention the critical object, the experimenter pointed to different things in the picture and asked what they were. This questioning (or prompting) never started with the critical object. Instead two or three questions about some neutral object were asked first. If a child gave a contextdependent answer to a critical object in a B picture, a second question of the same kind regarding this object was later asked to check the stability of this response. For example, if the child said that the school bag was a pillow behind the boy's head in picture number 3B, some other questions regarding this picture were asked, followed by the question " W h a t did you say the boy had behind his head?" Only if the child once again gave a context-dependent answer to this second question was it categorized as context-dependent. The sessions were tape-recorded. Order of Presentation. The order of presentation was varied, but it was not randomized because extra precautions were taken to minimize the subject's possibilities to see through the experiment and to preserve a sincel:e attitude to the testing situation. Therefore, the following constraints were imposed on each of the different orderings. The first picture presented was always of a critical object in an appropriate context (i.e., an A picture). For a similar reason only two B pictures in a row were allowed. Furthermore, A and B pictures belonging to the same pair were not allowed to follow immediately after each other. A balancing criterion (intrabalancing) was also imposed on the ordering. According to it, half of the B versions were to precede their A counterpart, and half of the A
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M,~rten Eriksson
(3A)
Figure 1. Pictures 3A and 3B showing a school-bag in an appropriate and in inappropriate context.
an
versions were to precede their B counterpart in a given order. The different orderings were also balanced among themselves (interbalancing) with regard to the times an A version preceded the B version. Fourteen different orderings were constructed, individually and collectively fulfilling these balancing criteria and constraints. Each child in each age group received one of these orderings (14 orderings x 5 age blocks = 70).
Categorization of the Child's Answers. The following responses were coded as acceptable answers: (a) the particular name for the critical object (e.g., "toothbrush" for pair number 1); (b) a name for the object and others, one step above (a) in a semantic hierarchy (e.g., " b r u s h " for pair number 1); or (c) gives
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(4A)
(4B) Figure 1 cont. Pictures 4A and 4B showing a balloon in an appropriate and in an inappropriate context.
a reasonable (verbal or nonverbal) explanation (e.g., says " f o r these" when pointing to his teeth for pair number 1). For the B picture, the child's answer was coded as: right (look) for what is right according to what the object looks like; right (con) for what is right according to the context (what the thing is used for, or what actions are taken upon the object); or mistake (i.e., no answer at all, a " d o n ' t k n o w , " or some other answer that is wrong according to both right (con) and right (look)). For the A pictures, the answers coded as right (con) and right (look) above coincide. Answers to these pictures were hence coded as either acceptable or mistaken. The crucial comparison was between the name the child used in version A and that used in version B. The relation between these two responses could fall into one of the following seven categories: I:
The child gives an acceptable name for the critical object in the A picture, but gives a contextually influenced name for the same object in the B picture.
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M~rten Eriksson
Table 2. Illustration of the Categorization of Answers to Each Pair of Pictures Allswers to" B pictures
A pictures
Correct Mistake
Right (con)
Right (look)
Mistake
I II
III IV
V VI
Note. "Right (con)" refers to what is right according to the
context. "Right (look)" refers to what is right according to what the object looks like. "Mistake" refers to no answer at all, a "don't know," or some other unsatisfying answer not due to contextual "cues." There were also four answers in a category labeled VII, due to extensive hesitation for the absurd picture. II:
III: IV.
V:
VI. VII:
The child gives a contextually influenced name for the critical object in the B picture, but gives an unacceptable name, or no answer, or says " I don't k n o w " when presented the A picture. The child gives an acceptable name to the critical object for both the A and the B picture. The child gives an acceptable name for the critical object in the B picture, but gives an unacceptable name, or no answer, or says " I don't k n o w " when presented the A picture. The child gives an acceptable name for the critical object in the A picture, but is silent, says " d o n ' t k n o w , " or gives an unacceptable but not contextually influenced name for the same object in the B picture. The child cannot give an acceptable name for the critical object either for the A or the B picture. The child hesitates between a " p r o p e r " and a contextually determined name for the critical object in the B picture without being able to make up his or her mind in spite of prompting from the experimenter.
This categorization is summarized in Table 2. Later, category V was divided into two subcategories, Va and Vb, depending on the kind of response to the B picture. In Va, the child was silent or said " d o n ' t k n o w " when presented the B picture. In Vb, the child gave it an unacceptable, but not contextually influenced, name. An index of contextual dominance (ICD) was constructed, based on the previous categorization. A formula of the form I + I I + V a / I + I I + I I I + IV+ V a + Vb was used to calculate an ICD score for each subject. A c c o r d i n g to this formula, the ICD score will be 1.00 if a subject gives contextually dominated answers to all the 10 pair of pictures and 0.00 if a subject gives no contextually dominated answers. The two categories I and II were included in the numerator for
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obvious reasons. The reason for including Va in the numerator was that when a child can name an object in an appropriate context but gives no name to the same object in an inappropriate context, this silence is due to a severe uncertainty as to what the proper name to the critical object in this context should be. The reason for this uncertainty is attributed to the inappropriate context. The ICD measure constituted the dependent variable for Experiment 1 and 2. Results For control purposes the division into the eight categories (including Va and Vb) was done by a student unfamiliar with the research hypothesis. She had access only to the description of the categories given above, a transcription of the children's answers, and a categorization done of two subjects for purpose of illustration of how the categories were to be used. Two samples from each age group were randomly drawn, resulting in 100 responses to be co-judged. Of these, 92 agreed (92%). O f the disagreements, no more than 2 were of the same kind. Thus reliability was considered satisfactory. The frequency of answers for each category and age group are shown in Table 3. From Table 3 it can be seen that most answers fell into categories I and III for four of the five age groups. For the 2-year-olds, however, there were more V I ' s than I's. An analysis of variance was performed with age, sex, and place of living as independent variables. Testing for main effects as well as interactions showed that age was the only variable approaching significance, F(19,50) = 2.25, p < .08, using the " m e t h o d o f weighted squares of m e a n s . " (See Speed, Hocking, & Hackney, 1978, for a discussion of methods of analysis of linear models with unbalanced data.) Hence, only age is considered in the subsequent analyses. An analysis of variance was used to assess differences among the five age groups (data are balanced for this variable). It yielded a significant age effect, F (4,65) = 3.46, p < .05. Post hoc t-tests showed that the performance of the 6year-olds was significantly lower than that for the other age groups but that there Table 3. Frequency of Answers in Each Category, Divided into the Five Age Groups Age group (years)
2 3 4 5 6
I
11
III
Category IV Va
Vb
VI
Vll
20 37 43 40 20 160
7 3 4 2 I 17
54 80 86 87 112 419
5 ----5
4 10 1 1 3 19
33 7 3 3 -47
I --1 2 4
16 3 3 6 2 30
M~rten Eriksson
398 T a b l e 4.
I C D Score from Experiment 1
and 2 ICD Score
Age Group (years) 2 3 4 5 6 Adults"
Mean
SD
.41 .35 .37 .35 .17 .13
.17 .25 .18 .20 .10 .10
"Data from an adult reference group were obtained in a second experiment (see Experiment 2) and are added in Table 4.
were no differences among these other four age groups (p < .05 gives a critical value of t = 1.99, and a least significant difference o f . 14). Table 4 and Figure 2 show the mean ICD score for each group. An analysis of the frequency of answers categorized as I + II + Va above (i.e., contextually dominated answers) shows that the context had a greater effect for 1.0 .9 .8 .7 .B 0 u t-.-I
.5 .4 .3 .2 .1 .0
,
0
,
~
,
,
2
,
,
3
,
,
4
,
,
5
,
,
B
,
,
7
,
,
B
AGE
Figure 2. Contextual dominance for children in Experiment 1 (open circles), and an adult reference group in Experiment 2 (broken line).
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~
1oo 95 90 85 8o "~ + ~4~ ~ ~ Z
w ~
~
ANSWEAS FAON THE 70 CHILO SUBJECTS IN EXPERIMENT t .
~ ANSWERS FROM THE
75 70 65 60 55 50 45
~£UBJECTS
14 ADULT
IN EXPERIMENT 2.
40
35 3o 25
2o t5 t0 5
....
0
2
3
! 4
5
6
7
1o
PICTURE NUMBER
Figure 3. Percentage of answers categorized as contextually dominated for each of the 10 B pictures.
some pictures than for others. The differences among pictures are illustrated in Figure 3. From Figure 3 it can be seen that the B version of picture 8 only gave 9% contextually dominated answers, while the B version of picture 9 gave 53%. A comparison of the total frequency of the contextually dominated answers ( I + I I + Va = 207) with the frequency of the other kinds of mistaken answers (Vb = 19) clearly indicates that it is the different context in the B picture that is responsible for the child's choice of another name for the critical object in this picture than for the same kind of object in the A picture (see Table 3). Noncontextually determined alternative answers are not commonly suggested for any of the pictures. Discussion
The results indicated a considerable amount of context-dependency for children in the task of naming a common object. This context-dependency was also negatively correlated with age. Some reservations should probably be made regarding the youngest group (the 2-year-olds), because the frequency of noanswers (categorized as VI's) for this group was much higher than for the others. It must be stressed, however, that a subject's score on this index is dependent on the particular pictures used. It is not possible to determine a standard level of inappropriateness for all pictures. Thus, the absolute level for a certain group is of little interest, only the relationship among groups can be interpreted. It is interesting that contextual dominance is significantly correlated to age, and that a significant drop was found between the 2-, 3-, 4-, and 5-year-olds on one hand, and the 6-year-olds on the other.
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M.~rten Eriksson
EXPERIMENT 2 In Experiment 2 it was attempted to determine a "base level" for the ICD value in terms of the performance of an adult reference group on the same task as in Experiment 1. There are good reasons to believe that the environmental context matters in this kind of tasks also for adults, however, this particular material was designed to suit young children. The specific question, then, is whether the ICD score will decrease to zero with this material for subjects older than 6 years.
Method
Subjects. The subjects were 14 first-semester students of psychology at Uppsala University. Their age ranged from 18 to 41 with a mean of 26 years. They received course credit for their participation. Materials.
The material was the same as in Experiment 1.
Procedure. The subjects were told that the pictures had earlier been used in an experiment in which children had to tell what they represented, and data on the same task would now be required for an adult group to serve as a comparison. It was emphasized that the experimenter's interest was in the clarity of the pictures and not in any profound interpretation about their meaning. Results and Discussion Environmental context mattered also for the adult group. The measured ICD values for the adults were slightly lower than those for the 6-year-olds, a mean of .13 a s c o m p a r e d to .17, but this difference is not significant (see Table 4 and Figure 2). (When the data from the adult group were added to the data of Experiment 1, the level of least significant difference decreased to. 13, t = 1.99, p < .05.) From Figure 3 it can be seen that picture 9B accounts for most of the contextually dominated responses for both the children and the adult group. To this picture (and also to picture 2B, though here the frequencies are quite low), adults actually scored higher on contextual dominance than the children did. An examination of picture 9B reveals that the critical object here is rather ambiguously painted. This suggests a tentative explanation for the high score on contextdependency both for children and adults on this picture, namely that context matters most where ambiguity concerning the object to be named is high. It is worth noting, however, that excluding pair 9 from Experiment 1 does not affect the results in any significant way. 2 2 Excludingitem 9 from Experiment 1 actuallyincreased the F-value of the age effect, F(4,65) = 5.07, p < .01. This increase is due to a tendency among the 2- and partly the 3-year-olds to give unacceptable answers to both 9A and 9B, categorizedas Vl's, which are not included in the formula
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EXPERIMENT 3 The purpose of Experiment 3 was to compare the way the critical objects were drawn in the absurd and in the normal context with respect to their clearness. This was important because it was a presupposition in Experiment 1 that the critical objects in the B pictures did not look more like what was suggested by this absurd context than what the same objects in the A pictures (normal context) did.
Method
Subjects. The subjects were 13 first-semester students of psychology at Uppsala U n i v e r s i t y ) Their age ranged from 19 to 34 with a mean of 26 years. Subjects received course credit for participation. Materials. Stimuli where slide versions of the same 20 pictures used in Experiments 1 and 2, plus another slide set of the same pictures in which everything but the critical object was covered by white cardboard. The 10 pictures with a visible normal context will be referred to as A pictures, and the 10 pictures with a visible absurd context will be referred to as B pictures, as before. The 10 pictures with an invisible normal context will be referred to as A ' pictures, and the 10 pictures with an invisible absurd context will be referred to as B' pictures. The slides were projected by a tachistoscope. Each slide exposure was manually turned on by the experimenter. The exposure lasted until the subject uttered something in a microphone (voice key). Exposure times were measured by a digital clock in milliseconds. The experimenter recorded the subject's answer and the latency for each picture. Procedure. The subject was informally told that the experiment was about comparing the clearness of some drawings that earlier had been used in an experiment with children. The subject was then seated at a distance of approximately 2.25 m from a projection screen, and was given two written instructions. The A and B pictures were presented in a new random order for each subject in one condition with a visible context, as were the A ' and B' pictures in another ,'.mdition with an invisible context. In the instruction to the A and B pictures, the subjects were asked to complete a sentence given by the experimenter for each picture as fast as possible. An answer was required to each sentence, and. it constitutingthe ICD. Hence, the ICD for these childrenis not affected by an exclusionof item9. The older children, on the other hand, gave many answers categorized as l's to this item. and since I is included in the numerator,excludingitem 9 gave a somewhat lower ICD value for them. Hence, the variance amongthe age groups increased. The resultsof the post hoc t-test, p < .05, t = 1.997, were not affected by this exclusion. 3 Twelve additional subjects were run in Experiment 3. However, since these data were incomplete due to problems with the voice key, they were later excluded.
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M~rten Eriksson
should consist of a noun and make the sentence apply to the concomitant picture. In the instruction to the A ' and B' pictures, the subjects were asked to say as fast as possible what they thought was in each picture. An answer was always required, and it should be in the form of a noun. Half of the subjects (7) were first presented to the 20 A and B pictures, and then the 20 A ' and B' pictures. For the other half of the subjects (6), the two series were presented in the reverse order. Thus every subject was exposed to 40 pictures in a repeated measures design. Results and Discussion
Two analyses were performed. The first was based on the unintended ( " w r o n g " ) answers the subjects gave, and the second on the latency of all the answers. In thefirst analysis the unintended answers were divided into two categories: (1) those specific answers that were contextually dominated and had caused a I or II categorization for this pair of pictures in Experiment 1 (a Va response was not possible here because an answer always was required); (2) answers not previously categorized as contextually dominated. The distribution of these two kinds of unintended answers for the A, B, A ' , and B' pictures is shown in Table 5. It was o f course expected that there would be no or few contextually dominated answers to the A pictures (with a visible normal context), because the context referred to in this expression is the absurd one. The results in Table 5 confirm this. That there were no contextually dominated answers to the A ' pictures (without visible context) also indicates that the critical objects in these pictures in no way look like what the contextually dominated suggestions to the pictures with inappropriate context imply. More interesting, however, is that answers that previously had been categorized as contextually dominated appeared only to the B pictures (with a visible inappropriate context). These answers were quite frequent: 27 recordings compared to only 6 other unintended answer to the same pictures. There was not one single answer previously categorized as contextually dominated to the B' picTable 5.
N u m b e r of Unintended Answers for the A, B, A', and B' Pictures Unintended Answers Previously Categorized as Contextually Dominated
Not Previously Categorized as Contextually Dominated
n
A
B
A'
B'
A
B
A'
B'
74
I
27
i
__
7
6
15
19
Note. Data are from 13 adult subjects. A = picture with context and object in appropriate use. B -- picture with context and object in inappropriate use. A' = picture without context and object in appropriate use. B' -- picture without context and object in inappropriate use.
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Table 6. Mean Latencies to All the Answers for the A, B, A', and B' Pictures A
B
A'
B'
1.52
1.78
4.00
2.51
Note. Data are from 13 adult subjects. A = picture with context and object in appropriate use. B = picture with context and object in inappropriate use. A' = picture without context and object in appropriate use. B' = picture without context and object in inappropriate use.
tures (without visible context). It seems therefore quite legitimate to attribute the cause of the contextually dominated answers in the B pictures to the context, and not to the way the critical object is painted. In the second analysis the latency for right answers was investigated. The results for the A, B, A ' , and B' pictures are shown in Table 6. A comparison here between the total mean times for the A ' and B' pictures shows that the value for the condition in which the concealed context was normal actually was higher (4.00 s) than when it was absurd (2.51 s). A two-way t-test showed, however, that this difference was not significant. After transforming the data to a log m scale to correct for the skewness in variance, t(12) = 0.545, p > .05, there is nothing in the these data either to indicate that the critical objects in the B pictures in any way " r e a l l y " look like what the contextually dominated suggestions to these pictures imply. From Table 6 we can also see that it took a somewhat longer time to correctly identify the critical object in the B picture (1.78 s) than in the A picture (1.52 s). However, this difference was not significant; the data transformed to a logto scale gave t(12) = - 1 . 5 4 3 , p > .05. An order of presentation effect between the conditions with visible context (pictures A and B) and the one with an invisible context (pictures A ' and B') was obtained. Latencies were much shorter for the A ' and B' pictures when they were presented after the A and B ones. A two-way t-test, transformed to a log m scale, gives t(12) = - 2.463, p < p < .05. No corresponding effect could be seen for the A and B pictures, however (t(12) = 0.137, p > .05). CONCLUDING DISCUSSION In Experiment 1 it was found that children up to the age of 5 were so influenced by the environmental context that this sometimes alone determined what a thing
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M~rten Erik~on
should be called. There was also a minor influence of the environmental context on adults' namings, as shown in Experiment 2, but here it seemed to be restricted to the cases in which the critical object was ambiguously painted. These results are consistent with Nelson's view that the functional relationships in which an object takes part (as manifested in the environmental context) are of utmost importance, especially for young children, in deciding the proper name for this object. The traditional theory of concept formation, presupposing an abstraction of necessary and sufficient sensory attributes, cannot account for the way the great majority of the mistakes in the present studies grouped around a single principle, namely context-dependency. However, an alternative explanation to the context-dependency in terms of association by contiguity cannot be ruled out from these experiments, but such an explanation is not very likely considering the Anglin (1977) study in which contiguity associations in the object namings of children were found to be very rare. The results from the present studies also showed that context-dependency was related to age, but it did not disappear gradually over the preschool years. Rather, the age Of 6 seemed here to be critical. This also fits nicely with the predictions made from Nelson's theory. Thus, Nelson's theory of semantic development has been useful in interpreting the phenomenon of decontextualization in the object namings of children. However, this theory is not very explicit regarding the very process of partitioning contextual-episodic material from the concept-specific material (see also Mervis, 1987). This problem therefore needs more attention. One comment to "the resolution of the perceptual-functional debate" suggested by Bates (1979) could also be made in the light of the present investigation. Bates's resolution is that functional features direct the child's attention to objects whose name should be learned, while later the perceptual features constitute the "semantic core of word meaning" after the acquisition of the word. However, the facts that the data indicating contextual-dependency in these experiments were not from an acquisition but a naming task, and that the drop in context-dependency for very simple objects was as !ate as between the years of 5 and 6, does not support this "resolution." Whether the strong influence of context on object naming of children was an effect of the medium used (pictorial representation) cannot be concluded from this study. An argument for this to be the case, starting with making the point that the information from the crucial objects would be richer and therefore more unambiguous if presented in reality, clearly would not do, since the same thing would go also for the context. However, even if it would be the case that the presented context-dependency of the object naming of children is limited to pictorial representation, the findings would not be irrelevant, since concept learning from pictures plays an important role in the child's language acquisition.
Development of Decontextualization
405 REFERENCES
Anglin, J.M. (1977). Word, object, and conceptual development. New York: Norton. Bates, E. (1979). The emergence of symbols: Cognition and communication in infancy. New York: Academic Press. Luria, A.R., & Yudovich, F.I. (1959). Speech and the development of mental processes in the child. London: Staple Press. Macnamara, J. (1982). Names for things. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Mervis, C. (1987). A theory of semantic development (Review of Making sense: The acquisition of shared meaning). Contemporary Psychology, 32, 503-504. Nelson, K. (1973). Some evidence for the cognitive primacy of categorization and its functional basis. Merrill-Palmer Quarterly Journal of Behavior and Development, 19, 21-39. Nelson, K. (1974). Concept, word and sentence: Interrelations in acquisition and development. Psychological Review, 81, 267-285. Nelson, K. (1979). Explorations in the development of a functional semantic system. In W. Collins (Ed.), Children's language and communication (Vol. 12, pp. 47-81.) Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. Nelson, K. (1985). Making sense: The acquisition of shared meaning. Orlando, FL: Academic Press. Speed, F.M., Hocking, R.R., & Hackney, O.P. (1978). Methods of analysis of linear models with unbalanced data. Journal of the American Statistical Association, 73, 105-I 12. Werner, H., & Kaplan, B. (1963). Symbol formation: An organismic-developmental approach to language and the expression of thought. New York: Wiley.
Development of Decontextualization in Object Naming M,~rten Eriksson Uppsala University
The first experiment in this paper investigated the influence of the environmental context on the naming practices of children for common objects. The answers of 70 children (2-6 years) to questions regarding 10 pairs of pictures were analyzed. One of the pictures in a pair showed a common object in an appropriate context, while the other showed the same object in an inappropriate context. The results showed that the environmental context affected the naming practices of children for common objects, sometimes to such a high degree that it dominated the perceptual appearance of the object. This effect was about the same for the ages 2-5 years, but significantly lower for the 6-year-olds. Adults' performance on the same task was studied in a second experiment, and was found to be about the same as for the 6-year-olds. The validity of the material was tested in a third experiment and was found to be satisfactory. The results were interpreted as a support for Nelson's functional theory of concept formation, both regarding the importance of the functional relationships in wh~rh nbjects take part, as well as to the age of when decontextualization of these *,arms are to be expected.
This study is concerned with object naming and object concepts. It is directed at the question of whether these are decontextualized during the course of language development. The term decontextualization implies that the early language forms of children are first embedded in specific contexts. The words refer to these contexts in a more or less undifferentiated way, and later become differentiated and available for general use. The notion that child language normally decontextualizes over age is old, Suggested by such authors as Luria and Yudovich (1959) and Werner and Kaplan (1963) among others. This theme also plays a crucial role in the more recent
This paper was based on part of the author's doctoral dissertation.I wish to thank Berndt Brehmer for his generous help and support of this work. I a m also grateful to the staffof the preschools, to the parents and children for theircooperation, to Anna Karin van Haaver for painting the pictures,and to Gunnar Jansson for comments on a draftof thisarticle.A poster based on thisresearch was presented at the Third European Conference on Developmental Psychology, Budapest, June 1988. Correspondence and requests for reprints should be sent to M~u'ten Eriksson, Department of Psychology, Uppsala University, Box 1854, S-751 04 Uppsala, Sweden.
Manuscript received August 10, 1988; revision accepted January 13, 1989
389
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M~Irlen Eriksson
functional theory of concept formation and lexical acquisition proposed by Nelson. However, in emphasizing that "words mean in context," Nelson herself prefers a formulation in terms of extension of meaning from one particular context of use, to m a n y I " e v e n t u a l l y all possible contexts" (Nelson, 1985, p. 60). The present study of decontextualization was performed in relation to her writings (primarily, Nelson, 1973, 1974, 1979, 1985). As opposed to the traditional assumptions of concept fornaation, Nelson does not consider this as a process of abstracting necessary and sufficient sensory attributes from a proper group of referents. She argues instead that it is the functional aspects of the referents that are essential. It is these functional relationships that are extended across different situations. A somewhat harsh formulation of this would be to say that it is the referents' functional relationships that are "defining" for the concept. (Nelson does not deny that perceptual attributes are important in a concept identification task, but their status is more accidental, though often highly correlated.) If the functional relationships in which a thing takes part are essential for the formation of the concept of the thing, at least for the young child, how would a child then name a well-known thing in a new and somewhat absurd functional relationship, that is, well-known in its usual relationship and absurd in the sense that these functions are usually performed by other things? That is the first problem assessed in this study. It is argued here that if children give a name suggested by the new functional relationships, such a phenomenon would be a clear case of a non-decontextualized concept. It is through the context that such functional relationships are mediated. Furthermore, if children give such a name to things in new functional relationships, this would also support the functional theory of concept formation as proposed by Nelson. If the object namings of young children are found to be context-bound, then the second problem concerns at what age in the child's development a decontextualization of very simple object terms begins. Nelson also gives some clues about this. It is seen in her description of the development of the cognitive representational system of meaning (Nelson, 1985, preliminary version 1979). Nelson described this system in a model consisting of three phases appearing in the lbllowing order: the prelexical, the conceptual, and the semantic. In the prelexical, the child acquires event-representations of familiar events. However, these representations are holistic, and the words of children in this phase refer to whole events or are uttered within the events. This phase extends to about the age of 18 months. In the conceptual phase, a partition between concept-specific information and contextual-episodic material takes place. Here, the child also begins to relate concepts to each other, and to exchange meanings with others. This phase extends until about the age of 5 years. In the semantic phase, the child has loosened the bindings between the word and the concepts, and is also able to establish hierarchical relationships among concepts. Further, the child can now start "to think in language about language"--this being a requirement for learning word meaning from language.
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Thus, according to Nelson, the context-dependence of the child's namings is a consequence of the concepts' foundations in event-representations. We can further conclude that this context-dependence should decrease drastically at the end of the conceptual phase, in which the bindings between the word and the concept are loosened. Hence, a prediction from Nelson's (1985) model is that the object namings of children should be decontextualized at about the age of 6. EXPERIMENT 1
This study investigated whether the early namings of children are context-bound, and whether the age of the children matters in this respect. A major problem in studying the effects of context is that the term context is both complex and vague. One common way to decrease this ambiguity is to restrict the study to the linguistic context. Another way, followed here, is to focus on the influence of the physical environment (or milieu) in which a certain concept appears. The contexts were especially chosen to emphasize two of the four aspects of function specified by Nelson (1979, 1985): action on things, and conventional uses of things. The names studied were names for concrete common nouns, or "names for things you may bump into" to use Macnamara's (1982) words to avoid the problematic definition of what constitutes a concrete common noun. Method
Subjects. Seventy children participated in the experiment. They were divided into five age groups with 14 children in each. A description of the subjects is given in Table 1. Thirty-two of the children lived in the city of Uppsala, and 38 of them in smaller villages. The children were tested in a familiar environment, which means at their preschool (60), in their homes (8), or in a friend's home (2). None of the children had started elementary school, t Materials. The material consisted of 10 pairs of drawings (28 cm x 39 cm) painted by an artist given specific instructions. In every pair, one member consisted of a common object in an appropriate context (called A picture), and the other member consisted of the same object in an inappropriate context (called B picture). The 10 critical objects (underlined in the descriptions) were: toothbrush, flower, school-bag, balloon, dice, pencil, shoe, policeman, hot dog, and clock. The pictures were selected as to be probable scenes in event-representations familiar to the children. They were as follows. IA.
A boy is standing in front of the washbasin in a bathroom and is about to brush his teeth. His mouth is open. He is holding the toothbrush in one hand and the toothpaste in the other.
I Children do not normallystart elementaryschool in Sweden before the age of 7.
M/trten Eriksson
392 Table 1. Age Group (years) 2 3 4 5 6
IB.
2A. 2B.
3A.
3B.
4A.
4B. 5A. 5B.
6A. 6B
7A.
Characteristics of the Subjects in Experiment 1 City (C)/ Village (V)
Mean Age
Sex
Range
n
(months)
(months)
F
M
C
V
14 14 14 14 14
30 44 54 65 78
24-35 41-47 49-59 60-71 73-82
4 7 10 7 8
l0 7 4 7 6
7 7 7 4 7
7 7 7 10 7
A girl is sitting at a desk, painting in water-color. In front of her is a halffinished painting, water-colors, papers, and pencils. The instrument she is working with on the paper is a toothbrush. Some children are picking flowers in a green summer field. Theflowers are plentiful. A family of four is sitting at the dinner table. The table is set with plates, glasses, silverware, deep-dishes, and shakers of salt and pepper. The plate in front of each person is full of potatoes and flowers. A classroom scene at the end of the day. A map of the world can be seen in the background. The children are about to leave the classroom. They are all carrying blue school-bags. A mother is about to read a goodnight story to her son in the child's bedroom. She is holding the book in her hand. Several toys can be seen on the floor. The boy is lying in bed. Under his head is a blue school-bag. Four children are sitting at a table enjoying a cake with five candles. It is a birthday party. Balloons and streamers can be seen everywhere. A woman is holding a pitcher of red punch. Two men in white clothes are playing tennis. They have rackets in their hands. In the air, over the net, is a red balloon. Two girls and a boy are sitting at a table playing a dice game. A board is on the table, and one of the girls has just thrown the dice. Two teams are playing football on a field. A team with green shirts are attacking. One can also see the back of three spectators. The players are kicking a very large black and white dice. A girl is sitting at a desk, writing a letter. She is holding a yellow pencil in her hand. A vase with a red rose can also be seen at the desk. A woman, wearing an apron, is working in the kitchen. The oven door is open. The woman is holding a baking-plate in her hands. The plate is full of yellow pencils. A boy is sitting on the floor in an almost empty room, putting on his
shoes. 7B.
One adult woman and two children are picking blue shoes from a tree. One child is using a ladder. They are putting the shoes in baskets.
Development of Decontextualization
8A.
8B.
9A.
393
A uniformed policeman with a raised baton is running after a thief. The thief is wearing striped clothes and looks very unshaven. He is carrying a brown sack on his back. A room-interior with a decorated Christmas tree and many lit candles. There is also a fire in the fireplace. Under the Christmas tree are some Christmas presents waiting. Four very expectant children are looking at the door the father is opening. In the doorway is a policeman. A child is sitting at a table with a plate full of mashed potatoes and hot
dogs. 9B. 10A. 10B.
A boy is standing in a bathroom, turning on the hot water tap. To the right on the washbasin, in the place of the soap, there is a hot dog. A clock is hanging on the wall in an almost empty room. A man is driving a red tractor on a field. In the place of the left rear wheel is a clock-face.
See Figure 1 for some examples of these pictures.
Procedure. All the children were tested individually by the author. In the cases of the youngest children, a parent or some other well-known caretaker was present. The testing lasted for 15-30 minutes. The drawings were shown to the child one at a time. The child was asked the content of the picture. If the child only said a few words or did not mention the critical object, the experimenter pointed to different things in the picture and asked what they were. This questioning (or prompting) never started with the critical object. Instead two or three questions about some neutral object were asked first. If a child gave a contextdependent answer to a critical object in a B picture, a second question of the same kind regarding this object was later asked to check the stability of this response. For example, if the child said that the school bag was a pillow behind the boy's head in picture number 3B, some other questions regarding this picture were asked, followed by the question " W h a t did you say the boy had behind his head?" Only if the child once again gave a context-dependent answer to this second question was it categorized as context-dependent. The sessions were tape-recorded. Order of Presentation. The order of presentation was varied, but it was not randomized because extra precautions were taken to minimize the subject's possibilities to see through the experiment and to preserve a sincel:e attitude to the testing situation. Therefore, the following constraints were imposed on each of the different orderings. The first picture presented was always of a critical object in an appropriate context (i.e., an A picture). For a similar reason only two B pictures in a row were allowed. Furthermore, A and B pictures belonging to the same pair were not allowed to follow immediately after each other. A balancing criterion (intrabalancing) was also imposed on the ordering. According to it, half of the B versions were to precede their A counterpart, and half of the A
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M,~rten Eriksson
(3A)
Figure 1. Pictures 3A and 3B showing a school-bag in an appropriate and in inappropriate context.
an
versions were to precede their B counterpart in a given order. The different orderings were also balanced among themselves (interbalancing) with regard to the times an A version preceded the B version. Fourteen different orderings were constructed, individually and collectively fulfilling these balancing criteria and constraints. Each child in each age group received one of these orderings (14 orderings x 5 age blocks = 70).
Categorization of the Child's Answers. The following responses were coded as acceptable answers: (a) the particular name for the critical object (e.g., "toothbrush" for pair number 1); (b) a name for the object and others, one step above (a) in a semantic hierarchy (e.g., " b r u s h " for pair number 1); or (c) gives
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(4A)
(4B) Figure 1 cont. Pictures 4A and 4B showing a balloon in an appropriate and in an inappropriate context.
a reasonable (verbal or nonverbal) explanation (e.g., says " f o r these" when pointing to his teeth for pair number 1). For the B picture, the child's answer was coded as: right (look) for what is right according to what the object looks like; right (con) for what is right according to the context (what the thing is used for, or what actions are taken upon the object); or mistake (i.e., no answer at all, a " d o n ' t k n o w , " or some other answer that is wrong according to both right (con) and right (look)). For the A pictures, the answers coded as right (con) and right (look) above coincide. Answers to these pictures were hence coded as either acceptable or mistaken. The crucial comparison was between the name the child used in version A and that used in version B. The relation between these two responses could fall into one of the following seven categories: I:
The child gives an acceptable name for the critical object in the A picture, but gives a contextually influenced name for the same object in the B picture.
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M~rten Eriksson
Table 2. Illustration of the Categorization of Answers to Each Pair of Pictures Allswers to" B pictures
A pictures
Correct Mistake
Right (con)
Right (look)
Mistake
I II
III IV
V VI
Note. "Right (con)" refers to what is right according to the
context. "Right (look)" refers to what is right according to what the object looks like. "Mistake" refers to no answer at all, a "don't know," or some other unsatisfying answer not due to contextual "cues." There were also four answers in a category labeled VII, due to extensive hesitation for the absurd picture. II:
III: IV.
V:
VI. VII:
The child gives a contextually influenced name for the critical object in the B picture, but gives an unacceptable name, or no answer, or says " I don't k n o w " when presented the A picture. The child gives an acceptable name to the critical object for both the A and the B picture. The child gives an acceptable name for the critical object in the B picture, but gives an unacceptable name, or no answer, or says " I don't k n o w " when presented the A picture. The child gives an acceptable name for the critical object in the A picture, but is silent, says " d o n ' t k n o w , " or gives an unacceptable but not contextually influenced name for the same object in the B picture. The child cannot give an acceptable name for the critical object either for the A or the B picture. The child hesitates between a " p r o p e r " and a contextually determined name for the critical object in the B picture without being able to make up his or her mind in spite of prompting from the experimenter.
This categorization is summarized in Table 2. Later, category V was divided into two subcategories, Va and Vb, depending on the kind of response to the B picture. In Va, the child was silent or said " d o n ' t k n o w " when presented the B picture. In Vb, the child gave it an unacceptable, but not contextually influenced, name. An index of contextual dominance (ICD) was constructed, based on the previous categorization. A formula of the form I + I I + V a / I + I I + I I I + IV+ V a + Vb was used to calculate an ICD score for each subject. A c c o r d i n g to this formula, the ICD score will be 1.00 if a subject gives contextually dominated answers to all the 10 pair of pictures and 0.00 if a subject gives no contextually dominated answers. The two categories I and II were included in the numerator for
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obvious reasons. The reason for including Va in the numerator was that when a child can name an object in an appropriate context but gives no name to the same object in an inappropriate context, this silence is due to a severe uncertainty as to what the proper name to the critical object in this context should be. The reason for this uncertainty is attributed to the inappropriate context. The ICD measure constituted the dependent variable for Experiment 1 and 2. Results For control purposes the division into the eight categories (including Va and Vb) was done by a student unfamiliar with the research hypothesis. She had access only to the description of the categories given above, a transcription of the children's answers, and a categorization done of two subjects for purpose of illustration of how the categories were to be used. Two samples from each age group were randomly drawn, resulting in 100 responses to be co-judged. Of these, 92 agreed (92%). O f the disagreements, no more than 2 were of the same kind. Thus reliability was considered satisfactory. The frequency of answers for each category and age group are shown in Table 3. From Table 3 it can be seen that most answers fell into categories I and III for four of the five age groups. For the 2-year-olds, however, there were more V I ' s than I's. An analysis of variance was performed with age, sex, and place of living as independent variables. Testing for main effects as well as interactions showed that age was the only variable approaching significance, F(19,50) = 2.25, p < .08, using the " m e t h o d o f weighted squares of m e a n s . " (See Speed, Hocking, & Hackney, 1978, for a discussion of methods of analysis of linear models with unbalanced data.) Hence, only age is considered in the subsequent analyses. An analysis of variance was used to assess differences among the five age groups (data are balanced for this variable). It yielded a significant age effect, F (4,65) = 3.46, p < .05. Post hoc t-tests showed that the performance of the 6year-olds was significantly lower than that for the other age groups but that there Table 3. Frequency of Answers in Each Category, Divided into the Five Age Groups Age group (years)
2 3 4 5 6
I
11
III
Category IV Va
Vb
VI
Vll
20 37 43 40 20 160
7 3 4 2 I 17
54 80 86 87 112 419
5 ----5
4 10 1 1 3 19
33 7 3 3 -47
I --1 2 4
16 3 3 6 2 30
M~rten Eriksson
398 T a b l e 4.
I C D Score from Experiment 1
and 2 ICD Score
Age Group (years) 2 3 4 5 6 Adults"
Mean
SD
.41 .35 .37 .35 .17 .13
.17 .25 .18 .20 .10 .10
"Data from an adult reference group were obtained in a second experiment (see Experiment 2) and are added in Table 4.
were no differences among these other four age groups (p < .05 gives a critical value of t = 1.99, and a least significant difference o f . 14). Table 4 and Figure 2 show the mean ICD score for each group. An analysis of the frequency of answers categorized as I + II + Va above (i.e., contextually dominated answers) shows that the context had a greater effect for 1.0 .9 .8 .7 .B 0 u t-.-I
.5 .4 .3 .2 .1 .0
,
0
,
~
,
,
2
,
,
3
,
,
4
,
,
5
,
,
B
,
,
7
,
,
B
AGE
Figure 2. Contextual dominance for children in Experiment 1 (open circles), and an adult reference group in Experiment 2 (broken line).
Development of Decontextualization
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~
1oo 95 90 85 8o "~ + ~4~ ~ ~ Z
w ~
~
ANSWEAS FAON THE 70 CHILO SUBJECTS IN EXPERIMENT t .
~ ANSWERS FROM THE
75 70 65 60 55 50 45
~£UBJECTS
14 ADULT
IN EXPERIMENT 2.
40
35 3o 25
2o t5 t0 5
....
0
2
3
! 4
5
6
7
1o
PICTURE NUMBER
Figure 3. Percentage of answers categorized as contextually dominated for each of the 10 B pictures.
some pictures than for others. The differences among pictures are illustrated in Figure 3. From Figure 3 it can be seen that the B version of picture 8 only gave 9% contextually dominated answers, while the B version of picture 9 gave 53%. A comparison of the total frequency of the contextually dominated answers ( I + I I + Va = 207) with the frequency of the other kinds of mistaken answers (Vb = 19) clearly indicates that it is the different context in the B picture that is responsible for the child's choice of another name for the critical object in this picture than for the same kind of object in the A picture (see Table 3). Noncontextually determined alternative answers are not commonly suggested for any of the pictures. Discussion
The results indicated a considerable amount of context-dependency for children in the task of naming a common object. This context-dependency was also negatively correlated with age. Some reservations should probably be made regarding the youngest group (the 2-year-olds), because the frequency of noanswers (categorized as VI's) for this group was much higher than for the others. It must be stressed, however, that a subject's score on this index is dependent on the particular pictures used. It is not possible to determine a standard level of inappropriateness for all pictures. Thus, the absolute level for a certain group is of little interest, only the relationship among groups can be interpreted. It is interesting that contextual dominance is significantly correlated to age, and that a significant drop was found between the 2-, 3-, 4-, and 5-year-olds on one hand, and the 6-year-olds on the other.
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M.~rten Eriksson
EXPERIMENT 2 In Experiment 2 it was attempted to determine a "base level" for the ICD value in terms of the performance of an adult reference group on the same task as in Experiment 1. There are good reasons to believe that the environmental context matters in this kind of tasks also for adults, however, this particular material was designed to suit young children. The specific question, then, is whether the ICD score will decrease to zero with this material for subjects older than 6 years.
Method
Subjects. The subjects were 14 first-semester students of psychology at Uppsala University. Their age ranged from 18 to 41 with a mean of 26 years. They received course credit for their participation. Materials.
The material was the same as in Experiment 1.
Procedure. The subjects were told that the pictures had earlier been used in an experiment in which children had to tell what they represented, and data on the same task would now be required for an adult group to serve as a comparison. It was emphasized that the experimenter's interest was in the clarity of the pictures and not in any profound interpretation about their meaning. Results and Discussion Environmental context mattered also for the adult group. The measured ICD values for the adults were slightly lower than those for the 6-year-olds, a mean of .13 a s c o m p a r e d to .17, but this difference is not significant (see Table 4 and Figure 2). (When the data from the adult group were added to the data of Experiment 1, the level of least significant difference decreased to. 13, t = 1.99, p < .05.) From Figure 3 it can be seen that picture 9B accounts for most of the contextually dominated responses for both the children and the adult group. To this picture (and also to picture 2B, though here the frequencies are quite low), adults actually scored higher on contextual dominance than the children did. An examination of picture 9B reveals that the critical object here is rather ambiguously painted. This suggests a tentative explanation for the high score on contextdependency both for children and adults on this picture, namely that context matters most where ambiguity concerning the object to be named is high. It is worth noting, however, that excluding pair 9 from Experiment 1 does not affect the results in any significant way. 2 2 Excludingitem 9 from Experiment 1 actuallyincreased the F-value of the age effect, F(4,65) = 5.07, p < .01. This increase is due to a tendency among the 2- and partly the 3-year-olds to give unacceptable answers to both 9A and 9B, categorizedas Vl's, which are not included in the formula
Development of Decontextualization
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EXPERIMENT 3 The purpose of Experiment 3 was to compare the way the critical objects were drawn in the absurd and in the normal context with respect to their clearness. This was important because it was a presupposition in Experiment 1 that the critical objects in the B pictures did not look more like what was suggested by this absurd context than what the same objects in the A pictures (normal context) did.
Method
Subjects. The subjects were 13 first-semester students of psychology at Uppsala U n i v e r s i t y ) Their age ranged from 19 to 34 with a mean of 26 years. Subjects received course credit for participation. Materials. Stimuli where slide versions of the same 20 pictures used in Experiments 1 and 2, plus another slide set of the same pictures in which everything but the critical object was covered by white cardboard. The 10 pictures with a visible normal context will be referred to as A pictures, and the 10 pictures with a visible absurd context will be referred to as B pictures, as before. The 10 pictures with an invisible normal context will be referred to as A ' pictures, and the 10 pictures with an invisible absurd context will be referred to as B' pictures. The slides were projected by a tachistoscope. Each slide exposure was manually turned on by the experimenter. The exposure lasted until the subject uttered something in a microphone (voice key). Exposure times were measured by a digital clock in milliseconds. The experimenter recorded the subject's answer and the latency for each picture. Procedure. The subject was informally told that the experiment was about comparing the clearness of some drawings that earlier had been used in an experiment with children. The subject was then seated at a distance of approximately 2.25 m from a projection screen, and was given two written instructions. The A and B pictures were presented in a new random order for each subject in one condition with a visible context, as were the A ' and B' pictures in another ,'.mdition with an invisible context. In the instruction to the A and B pictures, the subjects were asked to complete a sentence given by the experimenter for each picture as fast as possible. An answer was required to each sentence, and. it constitutingthe ICD. Hence, the ICD for these childrenis not affected by an exclusionof item9. The older children, on the other hand, gave many answers categorized as l's to this item. and since I is included in the numerator,excludingitem 9 gave a somewhat lower ICD value for them. Hence, the variance amongthe age groups increased. The resultsof the post hoc t-test, p < .05, t = 1.997, were not affected by this exclusion. 3 Twelve additional subjects were run in Experiment 3. However, since these data were incomplete due to problems with the voice key, they were later excluded.
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M~rten Eriksson
should consist of a noun and make the sentence apply to the concomitant picture. In the instruction to the A ' and B' pictures, the subjects were asked to say as fast as possible what they thought was in each picture. An answer was always required, and it should be in the form of a noun. Half of the subjects (7) were first presented to the 20 A and B pictures, and then the 20 A ' and B' pictures. For the other half of the subjects (6), the two series were presented in the reverse order. Thus every subject was exposed to 40 pictures in a repeated measures design. Results and Discussion
Two analyses were performed. The first was based on the unintended ( " w r o n g " ) answers the subjects gave, and the second on the latency of all the answers. In thefirst analysis the unintended answers were divided into two categories: (1) those specific answers that were contextually dominated and had caused a I or II categorization for this pair of pictures in Experiment 1 (a Va response was not possible here because an answer always was required); (2) answers not previously categorized as contextually dominated. The distribution of these two kinds of unintended answers for the A, B, A ' , and B' pictures is shown in Table 5. It was o f course expected that there would be no or few contextually dominated answers to the A pictures (with a visible normal context), because the context referred to in this expression is the absurd one. The results in Table 5 confirm this. That there were no contextually dominated answers to the A ' pictures (without visible context) also indicates that the critical objects in these pictures in no way look like what the contextually dominated suggestions to the pictures with inappropriate context imply. More interesting, however, is that answers that previously had been categorized as contextually dominated appeared only to the B pictures (with a visible inappropriate context). These answers were quite frequent: 27 recordings compared to only 6 other unintended answer to the same pictures. There was not one single answer previously categorized as contextually dominated to the B' picTable 5.
N u m b e r of Unintended Answers for the A, B, A', and B' Pictures Unintended Answers Previously Categorized as Contextually Dominated
Not Previously Categorized as Contextually Dominated
n
A
B
A'
B'
A
B
A'
B'
74
I
27
i
__
7
6
15
19
Note. Data are from 13 adult subjects. A = picture with context and object in appropriate use. B -- picture with context and object in inappropriate use. A' = picture without context and object in appropriate use. B' -- picture without context and object in inappropriate use.
Development of Decontextualization
403
Table 6. Mean Latencies to All the Answers for the A, B, A', and B' Pictures A
B
A'
B'
1.52
1.78
4.00
2.51
Note. Data are from 13 adult subjects. A = picture with context and object in appropriate use. B = picture with context and object in inappropriate use. A' = picture without context and object in appropriate use. B' = picture without context and object in inappropriate use.
tures (without visible context). It seems therefore quite legitimate to attribute the cause of the contextually dominated answers in the B pictures to the context, and not to the way the critical object is painted. In the second analysis the latency for right answers was investigated. The results for the A, B, A ' , and B' pictures are shown in Table 6. A comparison here between the total mean times for the A ' and B' pictures shows that the value for the condition in which the concealed context was normal actually was higher (4.00 s) than when it was absurd (2.51 s). A two-way t-test showed, however, that this difference was not significant. After transforming the data to a log m scale to correct for the skewness in variance, t(12) = 0.545, p > .05, there is nothing in the these data either to indicate that the critical objects in the B pictures in any way " r e a l l y " look like what the contextually dominated suggestions to these pictures imply. From Table 6 we can also see that it took a somewhat longer time to correctly identify the critical object in the B picture (1.78 s) than in the A picture (1.52 s). However, this difference was not significant; the data transformed to a logto scale gave t(12) = - 1 . 5 4 3 , p > .05. An order of presentation effect between the conditions with visible context (pictures A and B) and the one with an invisible context (pictures A ' and B') was obtained. Latencies were much shorter for the A ' and B' pictures when they were presented after the A and B ones. A two-way t-test, transformed to a log m scale, gives t(12) = - 2.463, p < p < .05. No corresponding effect could be seen for the A and B pictures, however (t(12) = 0.137, p > .05). CONCLUDING DISCUSSION In Experiment 1 it was found that children up to the age of 5 were so influenced by the environmental context that this sometimes alone determined what a thing
404
M~rten Erik~on
should be called. There was also a minor influence of the environmental context on adults' namings, as shown in Experiment 2, but here it seemed to be restricted to the cases in which the critical object was ambiguously painted. These results are consistent with Nelson's view that the functional relationships in which an object takes part (as manifested in the environmental context) are of utmost importance, especially for young children, in deciding the proper name for this object. The traditional theory of concept formation, presupposing an abstraction of necessary and sufficient sensory attributes, cannot account for the way the great majority of the mistakes in the present studies grouped around a single principle, namely context-dependency. However, an alternative explanation to the context-dependency in terms of association by contiguity cannot be ruled out from these experiments, but such an explanation is not very likely considering the Anglin (1977) study in which contiguity associations in the object namings of children were found to be very rare. The results from the present studies also showed that context-dependency was related to age, but it did not disappear gradually over the preschool years. Rather, the age Of 6 seemed here to be critical. This also fits nicely with the predictions made from Nelson's theory. Thus, Nelson's theory of semantic development has been useful in interpreting the phenomenon of decontextualization in the object namings of children. However, this theory is not very explicit regarding the very process of partitioning contextual-episodic material from the concept-specific material (see also Mervis, 1987). This problem therefore needs more attention. One comment to "the resolution of the perceptual-functional debate" suggested by Bates (1979) could also be made in the light of the present investigation. Bates's resolution is that functional features direct the child's attention to objects whose name should be learned, while later the perceptual features constitute the "semantic core of word meaning" after the acquisition of the word. However, the facts that the data indicating contextual-dependency in these experiments were not from an acquisition but a naming task, and that the drop in context-dependency for very simple objects was as !ate as between the years of 5 and 6, does not support this "resolution." Whether the strong influence of context on object naming of children was an effect of the medium used (pictorial representation) cannot be concluded from this study. An argument for this to be the case, starting with making the point that the information from the crucial objects would be richer and therefore more unambiguous if presented in reality, clearly would not do, since the same thing would go also for the context. However, even if it would be the case that the presented context-dependency of the object naming of children is limited to pictorial representation, the findings would not be irrelevant, since concept learning from pictures plays an important role in the child's language acquisition.
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405 REFERENCES
Anglin, J.M. (1977). Word, object, and conceptual development. New York: Norton. Bates, E. (1979). The emergence of symbols: Cognition and communication in infancy. New York: Academic Press. Luria, A.R., & Yudovich, F.I. (1959). Speech and the development of mental processes in the child. London: Staple Press. Macnamara, J. (1982). Names for things. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Mervis, C. (1987). A theory of semantic development (Review of Making sense: The acquisition of shared meaning). Contemporary Psychology, 32, 503-504. Nelson, K. (1973). Some evidence for the cognitive primacy of categorization and its functional basis. Merrill-Palmer Quarterly Journal of Behavior and Development, 19, 21-39. Nelson, K. (1974). Concept, word and sentence: Interrelations in acquisition and development. Psychological Review, 81, 267-285. Nelson, K. (1979). Explorations in the development of a functional semantic system. In W. Collins (Ed.), Children's language and communication (Vol. 12, pp. 47-81.) Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. Nelson, K. (1985). Making sense: The acquisition of shared meaning. Orlando, FL: Academic Press. Speed, F.M., Hocking, R.R., & Hackney, O.P. (1978). Methods of analysis of linear models with unbalanced data. Journal of the American Statistical Association, 73, 105-I 12. Werner, H., & Kaplan, B. (1963). Symbol formation: An organismic-developmental approach to language and the expression of thought. New York: Wiley.