Date of Completion

Spring 5-1-2024

Thesis Advisor(s)

Sumarga Suanda

Honors Major

Cognitive Science

Disciplines

Cognitive Science

Abstract

Developmental scientists have long been fascinated by children’s prodigious word learning capacities and by patterns in the composition of children’s early vocabularies that reveal that certain types of words are learned earlier than others. One notable pattern has been that words that denote more abstract concepts (e.g., “story”) are learned later than words that denote concrete objects (e.g., “ball”). In fact, prior studies have concluded that different kinds of abstract words, including nouns whose referents are not whole, concrete objects (or “hard nouns”; Kako, 2005), are not learnable from observational contexts alone and necessitate linguistic information to be learned. In line with the field’s emerging understanding that the trajectory of learning the meaning of many types of words is a long, protracted one (see Ameel et al., 2008), the current study provides empirical evidence that learners may extract systematic partial knowledge of hard noun meanings from the observational contexts these words occur in despite the absence of linguistic information. This partial knowledge may lay the foundation for full meaning acquisition upon the incorporation of linguistic and social information. The current study also highlights the need to carefully consider the tasks used in word learning, and thus our definition of learning.

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