SPECIFYING THE RELATION BETWEEN NOVEL AND KNOWN - INPUT AFFECTS THE ACQUISITION OF NOVEL COLOR TERMS

4 studies investigate how differential input affects preschoolers' abi lities to learn novel color words. 3-, 4-, and 5-year-old children saw objects in novel shapes and colors and heard a novel color 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, i t's mauve; it's a kind of purple''). 4- and 5-year-oId children interp reted the never word as a shape term when ostensive information was pr ovided but as a color term when additional information, either contras tive or inclusive, specified a relation between the novel term and a k nown label for that color. Furthermore children who consistently inter preted the novel ward as a color word tended to treat the novel and kn own labels as mutually exclusive color terms if they heard contrastive information, whereas they tended to treat the words as hierarchically related if they heard inclusion information. 3-year-olds generally di d not make use of either type of information in determining the semant ic domain of the novel word or the relation between terms.