First Language

This paper examines young children’s abilities to interpret new words as referring to collections. Two experiments examine English-, Spanish-, and Welsh-speaking children’s interpretations of novel nouns that could refer either to a single object or to a collection. Experiment 1 tested 53 3and 4-year-olds; Experiment 2 tested 30 2to 3-year-olds and 30 4to 5-year-olds. As early as two years of age, children’s responses to new nouns differ across these languages in ways that are consistent with differences in the languages they are learning. These results go counter to recent hypotheses claiming that children have innate or built-in biases concerning the meanings of new words. We argue that what the empirical data in those studies have been showing is not that children rely on built-in word meaning biases to determine the meanings of words, but rather that English-speaking children have learned something about the structure of English nouns and are relying on this knowledge to learn new nouns. We conclude that children learning distinct languages develop different types of first best guesses about the meanings of new words. Those first best guesses are a product of what children have already learned about how meanings get encoded in their language. * Special thanks are due to Pilar Soto, Eugenia Sebastidn and Alfonso Rodriguez for assistance in obtaining participants and in the collection of data from Spanishspeaking adults and children. Thanks are also due to the directors, parents and children at Tir na n-Og Nursery, Guarderia Bdrbel Inhelder, Ysgol Feithrin Llanfairpwll, Ysgol Gynradd Llanfairpwll, Ysgol Feithrin Bethesda and Ysgol Feithrin Llanddaniel Fab for their time and co-operation; without them this study could not have been conducted. Address for correspondence: Virginia C. Mueller Gathercole, School of Psychology, University of Wales Bangor, Bangor, Gwynedd LL57 2DG, Wales. E-mail: [email protected] © 2000 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution. at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV on April 10, 2008 http://fla.sagepub.com Downloaded from