Early Word Meanings: Perceptually or Functionally Based?

Abstract

The issue of whether early word meaning is based on perceptual (Eve Clark) or functional (Katherine Nelson) features has not been satisfactorily resolved by previous research. The present experiments addressed this issue by presenting young children (2- and 3-year-olds) with novel objects in which perceptual and functional features varied independently. Given choices of how to sort novel artificial objects varying in both aspects, children in experiments 1 and 2 chose perceptual features with few exceptions. Experiments 3 and 4 presented the same objects to children in a concept-learning task, where nonsense labels were to be learned for perceptually or functionally based categories; the latter were much more difficult. Experiment 5 was an extension of the first 2 experiments, except that more familiar objects were employed; comparable results were found. All of the results support 1 conclusion: early conceptualizations and word meanings are perceptually based when perceptual and functional features are independently available.

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