YOUNG-CHILDREN EXTEND NOVEL WORDS AT THE BASIC LEVEL - EVIDENCE FOR THE PRINCIPLE OF CATEGORICAL SCOPE

If young children approached the task of word learning with a specific hypothesis about the meaning of novel count nouns, they could make th e problem of word learning more tractable. Six experiments were conduc ted to test children's hypotheses about how labels map to object categ ories. Findings indicated that (a) 3- and 4-year-olds function with an antithematic bias; (b) children do not reliably extend novel nouns to superordinate exemplars when perceptual similarity is controlled unti l approximately age 7; and (c) children expect novel nouns to label ta xonomic categories at the basic level, even in the presence of a perce ptually compelling distracter. Results are interpreted as supporting t he principle of categorical scope (R. M. Golinkoff, C. B. Mervis, & K. Hirsh-Pasek, 1994).