4-year-old children’s preferences for certain hypotheses might affect their use of
contrastive linguistic information in the input to Ieam new words in two domains: material
and shape. There were three conditions: label only, material name contrast, shape name
contrast.
In the label only condition, the experimenter would point at a swatch a few feet away and
asked the child: “Can you bring me the rattan (or trapezoid) thing ?” When the child
handed her the swatch, she said: “See, it’s rattan (or trapezoid)”. In the Material Name
Contrast Condition, the child heard: “Can you bring me the rattan thing ? And then “See,
it’s not paper, and it’s not cloth. It’s rattan”. Each child heard a novel name contrasted
with two familiar material names. In the shape name contrast condition, the child heard:
“Can you bring me the trapezoid thing? And then “See, it’s not round, and it’s not
triangular. It’s trapezoid”. Each child heard a novel shape contrasted with two familiar
shape names.
Five tests were designed to find out what the children thought the new word was (sorting
task, co-hyponym task, colour identification task, material identification task, shape
identification task). This study revealed that children favoured shape over material in their
hypotheses. Children made use Oflinguistic contrast only in some situations. Three- and
four-year-olds benefited from pertinent linguistic contrast in learning novel material
names. They did not reliably benefit from pertinent linguistic contrast in learning novel
names for some shapes. In Study 2, another group of 3- and 4-year-olds were asked to
name the materials and shapes used for introducing these novel terms. It was found that
they benefited more when the novel term did not overlap much in denotation with any
terms commonly known by З-and 4-year-olds. These results suggest that children can use
information in the input very efficiently in learning a term for an as-yet-unnamed category,
but not in learning a term similar in denotation to a word they already know.
Gottfried and Tonks (1996) investigated how differential input affects preschoolers’
abilities to Ieam novel colour terms. Three- four- and five- year old children saw objects
in novel shapes and colours and heard a novel colour label for the object. Labels were
presented through ostensive definition (e.g., “See it’s mauve”) corrective linguistic
contrast (e.g., “See, it’s not purple; it’s mauve”) or an inclusion statement (e.g., “See it’s
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