Two- and 3- year old children are smart noun learners. Indeed, they are so skilled that they often need to hear only a single object named to correctly generalize that name to other members of the category. Young children's facility in mapping nouns to categories is particularly remarkable because nouns name objects in many different kinds of categories, categories of substances, people, animals, artifacts. This research tests the hypothesis that children learn how to learn words by learning words. The idea is that each word learned makes children ever smarter and ever faster word learners. The project tests four hpotheses: 1. Early learned nouns present the kinds of statistical regularities that could teach the organizational principles of different kinds. We will study the statistical properties of a corpus of about 300 nouns that are typical of the first nouns that children learn. 2. The statistical regularities characteristic of early noun categories are sufficient to create knowledge about kinds. We will teach the corpus of nouns to an associative learning device, a connectionist net. 3. The specific nouns known by an individual child determine how that child interprets and generalizes a newly encountered noun. We will measure the individual nouns known by children 20 to 36 months of age and their generalization of novel nouns in an artificial word learning task. We will present the connectionist network with the nouns that individual children know and attempt to model individual children's performances in artificial word learning tasks. 4. Children learning different languages exhibit different developmental trajectories. We will test hypotheses 1 through 3 in two languages - English and Japanese. Past research indicates that English- and Japanese-speaking children differ in their interpretation and generalization of novel names for novel objects. This research tests the idea that this is because children's novel noun generalizations reflect the statistical properties of the nouns that they have already learned. Children become smart learners of the specific language they are learning.

Agency
National Institute of Health (NIH)
Institute
National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH)
Type
Research Project (R01)
Project #
1R01MH060200-01
Application #
2884474
Study Section
Perception and Cognition Review Committee (PEC)
Program Officer
Kurtzman, Howard S
Project Start
1999-09-30
Project End
2003-05-31
Budget Start
1999-09-30
Budget End
2000-05-31
Support Year
1
Fiscal Year
1999
Total Cost
Indirect Cost
Name
Indiana University Bloomington
Department
Psychology
Type
Schools of Arts and Sciences
DUNS #
006046700
City
Bloomington
State
IN
Country
United States
Zip Code
47401
Mix, Kelly S; Prather, Richard W; Smith, Linda B et al. (2014) Young children's interpretation of multidigit number names: from emerging competence to mastery. Child Dev 85:1306-1319
Sethuraman, Nitya; Smith, Linda B (2013) Verbs and attention to relational roles in English and Tamil. J Child Lang 40:358-90
Yoshida, Hanako (2012) A Cross-Linguistic Study of Sound-Symbolism in Children's Verb Learning. J Cogn Dev 13:232-265
Kuwabara, Megumi; Smith, Linda B (2012) Cross-cultural differences in cognitive development: attention to relations and objects. J Exp Child Psychol 113:20-35
Ettlinger, Marc; Zapf, Jennifer (2011) The Role of Phonology in Children's Acquisition of the Plural. Lang Acquis 18:294-313
Kuwabara, Megumi; Son, Ji Y; Smith, Linda B (2011) Attention to context: U.S. and Japanese children's emotional judgments. J Cogn Dev 12:502-517
Sethuraman, Nitya; Laakso, Aarre; Smith, Linda B (2011) Verbs and syntactic frames in children's elicited actions: a comparison of Tamil- and English-speaking children. J Psycholinguist Res 40:241-52
Smith, Linda B; Colunga, Eliana; Yoshida, Hanako (2010) Knowledge as process: contextually-cued attention and early word learning. Cogn Sci 34:1287-314
Hidaka, Shohei; Smith, Linda B (2010) A single word in a population of words. Lang Learn Dev 6:206-222
Sethuraman, Nitya; Smith, Linda B (2010) Cross-linguistic Differences in Talking About Scenes. J Pragmat 42:2978-2991

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