How Two-Year-Old Children Interpret Proper and Common Names for Unfamiliar Objects

The linguistic form class of a word and the kind of object the word refers to both provide information for discovering whether a new noun refers to an object as a category member (e.g., a dog) or as an individual (e.g., Lassie). This study investigated children's use of both syntactic (i.e., form class) and semantic (i.e., type of referent) information, clarifying and extending work summarized by Macnamara. Although widely accepted, past results were inconclusive because (1) children were taught new words for objects they could already name, and (2) the earlier procedure lacked appropriate distractor items. This work eliminated these problems by using unfamiliar objects and a revised testing procedure. 32 2-year-olds were each taught 1 new noun. Linguistic form class (presence or absence of an article) and type of referent (animal-like or blocklike toy) were varied between groups. Children's interpretations of the new nouns were assessed by asking the subjects to select the named toy from an array of 4 toys (e.g., "Point to Zav"). With animal-like toys, Macnamara's claim that children interpret common nouns as category names, and proper nouns as individual names, was supported. With blocklike toys, children in our study interpreted a common noun as a category name, but there was a tendency for children in the proper noun condition to choose a particular stuffed animal as the new noun's referent rather than the named blocklike toy. These results show that 2-year-old children use both linguistic form class and their knowledge about real-world objects to interpret new words.