Blowfish Effect: How Children Learn New Words (IMAGE)
Caption
In word-learning experiments, children saw examples at the top of an iPad screen, identified by a new word like 'galt,' and then 12 more images below. After being asked, 'Can you find the galts?' they could select as many images as they wanted. The researchers at the Princeton Baby Lab were testing whether 3- to 5-year-olds would decide a 'galt' only meant the specific creature in the examples -- a poodle, in this case -- or if they would apply it more generally to all dogs. They found that the more unusual the example creature, the more likely the children were to apply the term narrowly. In the course of their research, the team of Baby Lab researchers found that young children use what they already know about objects -- how typical or unusual they are for their categories -- to help them figure out what newly encountered words mean, a type of sophisticated reasoning that was thought to develop much later.
Credit
iPad screenshot courtesy of the researchers
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