Myths of word learning
Paul Bloom
Department of Psychology
Yale University
If you attend a class on language acquisition, or read any good introductory chapter,
you are likely to learn the following facts about word learning. Children’s first words are
odd; they have funny meanings that violate certain semantic principles that hold for adult
language and they are learned in a slow and haphazard way. Then, at about 16 months, or
after learning about 50 words, there is a sudden acceleration in the rate of word learning—a
word spurt or vocabulary explosion. From this point on, children learn words at the rate of
five, ten, or even fifteen new words a day.
I will suggest here that none of these claims are true. They are myths of word
learning. There is no reason to believe that children’s first words are learned and
understood in an immature fashion -- and there is considerable evidence to the contrary.
There is no such thing as a word spurt, and 2-year-olds are not learning anywhere near five
words per day.
To call these notions “myths” is not to say that they are silly or obviously wrong,
and it certainly is not to attribute sloppiness on the part of researchers who accept them.
What it does imply is that these claims about word learning exist, not because of any
empirical support that they have, but because they possess certain properties that hold for
myths in general – they have some foundation in truth, they make for a good story, and
they convey a message that we want to hear (Brunvand, 1981; Campbell, 1972; Shermer,
2000). I will critically explore each of these myths of word learning (see also Bloom,
2000), suggest some reasons for their popularity, and conclude with an alternative
perspective on the nature of early word learning.
Myth 1: Children’s first words are weird
It is often claimed that children’s first words are understood and learned differently
from the words that they know later. This claim of discontinuity is typically rooted in a
learning or constructivist theory – children need to gradually learn, through experience, the
nature of words (e.g., Nelson, 1988). But it is equally consistent with a nativist view in
which knowledge of language emerges through neural maturation. Chomsky (1975), for
instance, suggests that “It is possible that at an early stage there is use of language-like
expressions, but outside the framework imposed ... by the faculty of language—much as a
dog can be trained to respond to certain commands, though we would not conclude, from
this, that it is using language.”
The sole source of evidence for the weird first words claim is anecdotal, based on
observations of how children use words. And indeed, there is no shortage of reports of
such odd usage. Consider the following examples:
!
The word “car”, used only when cars move on the street below the living-room
window
(L. Bloom, 1973)
!
The word “hot” used to describe an oven (Macnamara, 1972)
!
The word “flying” used to describe birds (Dromi, 1987)
!
The word “pee-pee” used to describe a picture of an ice-cream cone (Bloom, 2000)
!
The word “hat” used to describe a green pepper placed on the child’s head (Bloom,
2000)
!
The word “moon” used to talk about a half grapefruit, the dial of a dishwasher,
hangnail, and other circular entities (Bowerman, 1978)
!
The word “apple” used to describe a doorknob (Clark, 1973)
!
The word “sock” used to describe a shoe (Dromi, 1987)
These are the sorts of errors that are typically cited, and their veracity is not in
question. But what do they really tell us?
Imagine for a moment that you were to move to a foreign country, and were to have
the good fortune to live with a family that includes a psychologist observing your speech
habits. Your mental powers are entirely mature; but you do not know the language and you
are unfamiliar with many of the objects around you.
As you begin to use words, the psychologist is likely to observe all of the patterns
found above. You might use a word only in a certain specific context – such as “car” only
when you are looking out a window – because that is the only context that inspires you to
use the word. Since the oven is hot and the bird is flying, you may well point to the oven
and describe it as “hot”, and to the bird and describe it as “flying”. (You would be
particularly prone to do so if you never learned, or had forgotten, the words for oven and
for bird.) In a cheerful mood, hoping to impress your hosts with both your language skills
and your powers of observation, you might observe that a picture of an ice cream cone
resembles a penis. What you would like to say is “Isn’t it a hoot that this depiction of an
ice-cream cone resembles a penis? Someone should write a nasty letter to the publisher”.
But since you know only a few words, you have no recourse other than to point and say,
“pee-pee”. For similar reasons, you use “moon” and “apple” to point out that your hangnail
resembles the moon and the doorknob looks much like an apple. To amuse this family that
has been so kind to you, you place a green pepper on your head and call it a “hat”. Finally,
one day you wish for someone to hand you a shoe, but since you never learned the word
“shoe”, or learned it and forgot it, or could not make sense of the puzzling footwear that
these people wear, you point and said “sock”.
Imagine if you were to discover later that, on the basis of your speech patterns, the
psychologist determined that you were learning words in an atypical way, without benefit
of semantic constraint. Wouldn’t this be unfair?
This is not a complaint about the use of anecdotal evidence to constrain theories of
language acquisition. Someone once admonished, “the plural of anecdote is not data”, but
this seems unreasonably harsh. Properly used, anecdotes can be of considerable relevance
to scientific theory, and particularly to developmental psychology. Indeed, the plural of
anecdote is often a book chapter. The real worry is over the proper interpretation of this
anecdotal evidence. By definition, a pattern of word usage only counts as immature if it is a
different pattern of word usage than you would get from an older child or adult in the same
situation. But this comparison is never done, and the sorts of examples summarized above
provide not even a hint that such a difference exists.
The methodological moral here is clear enough – what one needs to do, at the very
least, is compare the sorts of words spoken by young children who are picking up their
first language with the sorts of words spoken by adults who are learning a second
language. This might seem impractical, but one doesn’t need to actually observe this sort of
adult learning – one can mimic it in a lab, by teaching adults an artificial language, as done
by Gillette et al. (1999). In fact, even without this sort of empirical contrast, one could
imagine all sorts of anecdotes that really would suggest a difference between how young
children learn words and how everyone else learns words. For instance, young children
might generalize object names on the basis of their color, instead of overall shape and
function, and so they might use “cup” to refer to all the things that are the same color of a
given cup. Or they might link words to the specific people who use them, so that when
Mommy says “milk” it means one thing and when Daddy says “milk” it means another. Or
they might treat common nouns as picking out specific individuals, and only use “cat” to
refer to their own cat. And so on. These are the sorts of patterns of language use that do not
occur with older children and adults learning a second language. But they do not occur in
the speech of younger children either.
Note also that when careful empirical studies are done, looking at the speech of many
children, the conclusion is that early words are no different in semantic type than later
words (Huttenlocher & Smiley, 1987; Rescorla, 1980). It is also revealing that when
Nelson (1973) did her classic study of 18 children’s first 50 words, she observed that most
of them were prone to point to things and ask their names, by saying something “Wha?” or
“Eh?”. This suggests that they have some appreciation that words can refer to kinds of
objects. Going back to Chomsky’s suggestion, it certainly is not something that dogs do.
Finally, putting aside the question of how young children understand words, what
about their ability to learn words? It is clear that when children start off learning language,
they acquire words at a slower rate than children who have already know many words. But,
to anticipate some of the points that will be raised below in the discussion of the word
spurt, this need not be a difference in kind; it could simply be a difference in degree.
Such a difference in degree could have several sources. It might reflect the
development of memory capacity. It could reflect different conceptual resources; babies
learn fewer words than older children because they have more limited conceptual structure
for words to map onto. Or they might be less skilled at the phonological task of
distinguishing similar-sounding phonemes. The developing increase in the rate of word
learning might also reflect differences in “theory of mind” capacities, corresponding to an
increasing ability to discern the intentions of adults who use words. Any combinations of
these factors might explain the difference in rate of learning (see Bloom, 2000 for review).
What we do know is that if you make the task easy enough, even very young
children learn words quite well. In one study, 13-month-olds were told the name of a novel
object several times during a five-minute session (“This is a tukey. See, it’s a tukey …”);
another object was present and commented on several times, but not named (“Look at this
one …”). Even after a 24-hour delay, these children did better than chance when shown the
two objects and asked to point to “the tukey” (Woodward, Markman, & Fitzsimmons,
1994; see also Oviatt, 1980). This poses a serious problem for any theory positing a sharp
discontinuity.
Myth 2: There is a word spurt, or vocabulary explosion
It is often said that word learning starts slow but then, at about 16 months of age, or
when a child learns about 50 words, things really start to happen. Word learning begins in
earnest. This is variously called a word burst, word spurt, vocabulary burst, naming
explosion, word explosion, and so on. There are dozens of studies that analyze children’s
speech, plot their vocabulary sizes at different ages, and identify the point at which the spurt
takes place. Then they ask the theoretical question of what happens in the mind of the child
to cause this spurt to occur. There are several possibilities. It might be the insight that
language is symbolic (sometimes known as the “naming insight”) (Dore, 1978; McShane,
1979), the ability to categorize in a mature fashion (Gopnik & Meltzoff, 1986), the onset of
special word-learning constraints (Behrend, 1990), or the result of the non-linear dynamics
of a connectionist learning algorithm (Plunkett et al., 1992).
But does a word spurt even exist? This might seem like an odd question. After all, I
just mentioned all of the studies that show it does, studies that identify, for various children,
the point at which the word spurt happens. So how can anyone doubt its existence?
The concern exists because these studies use a very odd definition of “word spurt”.
They count the child as achieving a word spurt when he or she starts to learn words at a
certain rate, regardless of how rapidly the child was learning words before reaching this
point. For instance, the criteria for a “word spurt” include 10 or more new object names in a
3-week period (Gopnik and Meltzoff, 1986), 12 or more new words in a 3-week period
(Lifter & Bloom, 1989), 10 or more words in a 2-and-a-half week period (Goldfield &
Reznick, 1990) 10 or more words in a 2-week period, at least 5 of which are object names
(Mervis & Bertrand, 1995), or 2 new words in 2-and-a-half week, taken from a list of
words that are expected to be difficult (Reznick & Goldfield, 1992).
These criteria do not correspond to any change in rate; they correspond instead to
the attainment of a certain rate. Because of this, they do not necessarily reflect dramatic
changes in the course of word learning, and have little to do with spurts, bursts, or
explosions in any normal use of the expressions.. For instance, a child who learns 12
words in 3-weeks is counted as having a “word spurt” by the Lifter & Bloom (1989)
criteria even if she had learned 11 words in the previous 3 week period, and 10 words in
the 3 weeks before that. Indeed, by these criteria, the existence of a “spurt” is a
mathematical necessity. Since 17-year-olds know roughly 60,000 words (see below for
discussion), then, at some point in development, they need to learn 70 words a week, which
means that they must, at some point, start to learn words at the rate of over 12 in a 3-week
period.
To see why this matters, consider the following example, from Bloom (2000, p.41):
If Joe has eaten 40 french fries in 10 minutes, there has to be some period of
time in which he eats french fries at the rate of more than 2.5 per minute. But
this does not entail a “starch spurt” or “french fry explosion”. One might
occur; Joe might nibble at his fries at a leisurely rate for the first nine minutes
and thirty seconds, and then gobble the rest down in the remaining half-
minute. But it is also possible that Joe could eat his fries at a constant rate. Or
he could eat one fry in the first minute, and then slowly speed up his rate of
fry eating. There would be no spurt, just a gradual increase. To point to the
moment he starts eating fries at the rate of 2.5/minute and say “aha!—that’s an
eating explosion” is worse than bad terminology, it leads to bad theorizing,
since it gives the false impression that something special is happening at this
point, something that has to be explained.
Going back to words, focusing on the point at which children learn 12 words in 3
weeks (for instance) is only interesting if this reflects a sharp increase in rate from previous
word learning. If it does not, then this choice is arbitrary, and there is no rationale for trying
to “explain” the cause of this point in development. One might just as well struggle to
explain what happens at the point when children learn 3 words in 12 weeks, or 100 words
in 3 weeks, or 45 words in 7 weeks (at least 16 of which must be verbs). It is a
meaningless enterprise.
But, of course, maybe something does happen at the point of learning 12 words in 3
weeks. Perhaps this rate of word learning always coincides with a dramatic shift in
development. The assumption that this true is surely why this sort of criterion is used in the
first place. If so, then this notion of a word spurt would be justified, silencing skeptics such
as Bates & Carvenale (1993), Bloom (2000), and Elman et al., (1996), who suggest that
there is a roughly linear increase in rate: Children start learning words slowly and then
gradually learn them faster and faster.
Only recently has there been data that bears on this question. Ganger & Brent
(2001) analyzed the vocabulary development of several children, plotting their rate of word
learning as a function of their vocabulary size. They modeled the rate with a logistic curve,
and tested to see if there would be an “inflection point” at any point between 30 and 60
words--the period at which researchers claim that the spurt typically occurs. Such an
inflection point would correspond to a sudden increase in the rate of word learning. Ganger
& Brent also tried to model the data with a quadratic model (which includes a linear model)
that does not have an inflection point. If such a model works better than the logistic model,
it would suggest that the child did not have a word spurt.
They first looked at 19 children from a large-scale study of language development
in twins. (Only one child for a twin pair was sampled.) They found that 5 of these children
had an inflection point between 30 and 60 words, and that their vocabulary development
was better modeled with the logistical model than with the quadratic model. The remaining
14 children showed no inflection point during that period; to put it differently, nothing
interesting happened to their rate of word learning between 30 and 60 words.
Maybe twins are atypical. Ganger & Brent went on to analyze the published data
from one of the major studies in this domain – Goldfield and Reznick (1990). The data
from 17 out of the 18 children could be extracted from the graphs, and Ganger & Brent
found that only 3 of these children had a word spurt in any real sense of the term – only 3
of the children’s vocabulary rates were best modeled by logistic functions with inflection
points between 30 and 60 words.
In sum, 8 of the 36 children showed signs of a vocabulary spurt, and Ganger &
Brent conclude with the following rhetorical question: “If less than a quarter of children
have a spurt, do we really want to posit a substantial cognitive change, like the naming
insight, to account for it?” Actually, if anything, they are being overly generous. In order to
conclude that 8 out of 36 children actually did go through a word spurt, one would need to
do some sort of statistical analysis to determine whether the logistic patterns of these 8
children may have occurred due to chance. (I am not being critical of Ganger & Brent for
not doing such an analysis, as it is devilishly hard to figure out how to do so.)
Note also that when we plot changes in children’s vocabulary size, we do so in a
very indirect manner. We draw our graphs based on what children say, which is a quite
imperfect measure of what they know. So suppose you find a sudden increase in the
number of different words spoken by a given child once she has hit the 50-word mark.
This could mean that she has suddenly got better at word learning, and had a word spurt.
But it could also reflect a change in how talkative she is. After all, the likelihood of any
given word being spoken increases as a function of the number of words that the person
says. Suppose I want to estimate your vocabulary size, and had to do so by recording all
the different words you used in conversation. The more you speak, the more words I am
likely to find, up until the point at which you have exhausted your vocabulary.
This confound between number of words spoken and estimated vocabulary size
might seem obvious, but it has some non-trivial implications. For instance, some
investigators have found dips in the rate of vocabulary growth, points at which somewhat
older children start learning words at a slower rate (Dromi, 1987). These are sometimes
explained as the result of children shifting resources away from word learning in order to
learn syntax (van Geert, 1991), but there is a simpler account. As children’s vocabularies
grow, any single new word is less likely to be uttered, and so, unless one moves to a
different way of estimating vocabulary size, such as a comprehension measure, there will
be some point at which it would appear as if they are learning words at a slower rate.
Suppose two children learn five new words a week, but one of them starts with 20 words
and the other starts with 200 words. A jump from 20 to 25 words is striking, and the
investigator will observe a clear increase in vocabulary size, while a jump from 200 to 205
words is harder to notice, and might look like no increase at all.
Is there any reason to reject the null hypothesis that there is no interesting change in
the rate of word learning through the course of language development? Yes – but it does
not come from the study of young children. Most of the words that high-school graduates
know are not picked up through conversation; instead they are learned through reading
(Sternberg, 1987). By one estimate, even students who read relatively little will be exposed
to about 10,000 words a year that they do not know (Nagy & Herman, 1987). This
suggests that there might well be a spurt in the rate at which children acquire words, not
when they are toddlers, but when they are in school, learning how to read.
Myth 3: Young children learn 10 new words a day
Estimates of adult vocabulary size used to be low. The linguist Max Muller
suggested that highly educated people use up to 4,000 words, while other adults know
about 300 words. One respected intellectual claimed that the vocabulary of peasants does
not exceed 100 words; they make do with such a small number because “the same word
was made to serve a multitude of purposes, and the same coarse expletives recurred with a
horrible frequency in the place of every single part of speech”. More recently, the writer
Georges Simenon said that his writing style was constrained by the fact that the average
Frenchman knows fewer than 600 words (see Aitchison, 1994).
More sophisticated measures give rise to much larger estimates. One commonaccepted estimate is that a high-school graduate knows 60,000 words, if one includes
proper names and idiomatic expressions (e.g., Miller, 1996; Nagy & Herman, 1987;
Pinker, 1994). If we assume that children start learning words on their first birthday, this
means that they have learned 60,000 words in 16 years, which equals 3,750 words per
year, which equals over 10 words a day.
This is the basis for claims such as the following:
“Then the baby starts acquiring combinations of phonemes, i.e., words, at the rate of about
nine new words a day” (from a popular book on language)
“… which works out roughly to nine new words a day from about eighteen months
on” (from a classic review in word learning)
“… averages (after age 1) to nearly 5000 words each year, or 13 each day!”. (from a bestselling introductory text in psychology)
“Since children start learning words at about their first birthday, this means that they have
to learn, on average, ten new words a day, an astonishing feat.” (from a 2001 article in a
cognitive science journal)
The numbers differ somewhat, but given how rough the estimates of adult
vocabulary size are, the lack of consensus as to what counts as a “word” and what counts
as “knowing” a word, and the considerable variation of knowledge in the adult population,
there is little point quarreling over a precise number (Aitchison, 1994; Miller & Wakefield,
1993; see Bloom, 2000 for review). But what is wrong with all of these claims is the
implication – made with various force in the above quotes – that the 9-13 words/day fact is
true early in development, that it is true for “the baby”, “from eighteen months on”, “after
age 1”, or after “about their first birthday”.
Such a claim would not be misleading if the rate of word learning were constant. If
you were told how many heartbeats an average 17-year-old has had, and wanted to figure
out how many heartbeats the average child has in his or her third year of life, a reasonable
way of doing so would be to take the number and dividing by 17. But now imagine being
told how many alcoholic beverages an average 17-year-old has consumed. For the sake of
illustration, I will make up a number: 160. And now consider the following claims:
“Then the baby starts drinking at the rate of ten alcoholic beverages a year”
“… which works out roughly to ten new alcoholic beverages a year, from eighteen months
on.”
“… averages (after age 1) to over 10 alcoholic beverages a year, or 1 every 5 weeks!”
“… this means they have to drink, on average, ten alcoholic beverages a year, an
astonishing feat.”
All of the above claims, like their parallels in the word learning domain, are, in
some strict sense, correct. They are also highly misleading. When you say that babies start
drinking ten beverages a year, it strongly implies that babies drink ten beverages a year,
which is surely not true. When the similar claims about word learning are made, their goal
is to impress the reader with the astonishing power of young word learners. But if the
authors really believe that 2-year-olds learn ten words a day, they are mistaken; and if not,
then they are misleading the reader, intentionally conveying a myth of word learning.
There is only one way to figure out how many words a day children learn in
a given year, and this is to look at how many words they learn during that year, and to
divide by 365. The answer, by the way, is that 1-year-olds learn a new word about every 2
days, and 2-year-olds learn about 2 words a day (see Fenson et al., 1994). These numbers
are themselves misleading, since a child who is about to have her second birthday is
learning words at a much faster rate than one who just had her first birthday, and a 2-yearold about to turn into a 3-year-old is learning at a much faster rate than one who has just
turned two. But in any case, none of these children are learning even close to ten words a
day.
There is a second, subtler, problem with these numerical averages. These
calculations assume that learning a word is a punctate event. It is like a heartbeat, or
drinking an alcoholic beverage. And there are cases in which this is clearly true. Do you
know the word uxorious? It means: to be excessively fond of one’s spouse. There, now
you know it. Some word learning really does work that way – in seconds, you can learn a
new word.
But this is not necessarily how word learning works in general. Consider the
following claim:
In the year before her tenure file was due, Jane wrote four empirical papers
Does this mean that Jane wrote a paper every three months? Perhaps, but there are
two problems with such an inference. The first was mentioned earlier – the rate might not
be constant. Jane might have dawdled over one paper in the first six months, did the second
in the next four months, the third in five weeks, and hurried through the fourth in the final
week. The second problem with this inference is that paper writing is the sort of activity
that can be done in parallel. Jane might have spent the first few months writing the
introductions for each of her four papers, the next six months on methods and results, and
the rest of the year on the discussion, polishing the draft, and agonizing over the
appropriate font. Indeed, maybe Jane is incapable of writing a paper in three months – she
could not do it if her life depended on it. Still, this does not preclude her from writing four
papers per year.
Is learning a word like drinking a beer or is it like writing a paper? Is it accurate to
view an 8-year-old as learning about 20 new words a day (based on Anglin, 1993), or is it
better to view an 8-year-old as spending the entire year working out the meanings of 7,300
words? More generally, do children learn ten words a day from 12 months to 17 years, or
do they spend each day learning a a tiny bit of each of 60,000 words?
Both extremes are unrealistic. Children plainly do learn at least some words in a
punctate manner; they do not need days, weeks, months, or years of cumulative experience
to learn them. But children also plainly do learn at least some words in a drawn-out fashion,
building up their meanings of the course of years. Verbs such as “pour” and “fill”, for
instance, undergo semantic development that last long until the middle years (Gropen et al.,
1991), certainly this is also the case for abstract words like “game”, “democracy”, and so
on.
In sum, even when one is careful to allow for changes in the rate of word learning,
the notion that word learning can be accurately summed up as “x-year-olds learn y words
per day” is overly simple, and provides a false impression of how words are learned.
Discussion
These myths about word learning exist because they satisfy three general criteria.
First, they are rooted in truth. Someone new to the field would have no reason to
doubt that 1-year-olds start off with funny non-adult-like words, then go through a
dramatic change in their word learning capacities, at which point they learn ten new words a
day. When young children start to use words, they do say funny things, and we are
fascinated and amused by these odd usages (consistent with Myth 1). Children do start off
slow, and then speed up. When one looks at the data, it turns out that the rate of growth is
roughly linear, but there is a perception of a qualitative shift – from slow word learning to
fast word learning. (consistent with Myth 2). And once word learning gets going, it does
seem to be astonishingly fast – it really could be ten words per day (consistent with Myth
3).
Second, they tell a good story. The child starts off poorly, undergoes a radical
transition, and then comes to possess an astonishing ability. It is straight out of Dickens.
Third, it is a story that is appealing in many ways. Discontinuities of representation
and of learning pose interesting research questions; they motivate scientific research
programs, and can lead to discoveries. And the third myth makes the entire topic of word
learning appealing to a broader audience – when one announces that children learn words,
on average, at the rate of ten per day, this factoid is rewarded with interest and excitement.
It is, after all, quite striking, and adds spice to a colloquium or a grant proposal. If only it
were true.
But the story is appealing for a deeper reason as well. Many psychologists endorse
the view that word learning stands on its own as a distinct domain. It involves solving a
unique induction problem; it has its own biases and constraints; its special learning
principles. Word learning is special, either because it is the product of an specialized innate
system, or because it become special through repeated practice and increasing
understanding. These myths are entirely consistent with such a view.
This paper has been critical, but I want to conclude on a positive note, by presenting
an alternative theory, one I have defended in detail elsewhere (e.g., Bloom, 2000, in press).
This is that the ability to learn words is the result of more general aspects of our mental life,
including conceptual capacities, theory of mind, and grammatical knowledge. For many,
this view is unappealing. It lacks the intellectual audacity of strong nativism, while at the
same time missing out on the nerdy appeal of connectionism, and the down-home
parsimony of associationism more generally. And it is, in some regards, pessimistic. If it is
true that word learning can only be understood in terms of the interaction of more general
capacities, it implies that we will only fully understand word learning once we fully
understand these other capacities, which in turn implies that a complete theory of word
learning will have to wait for a complete theory of psychology in general. This may be a
long wait.
There is, however, considerable support for this view. Most of all, there is
converging evidence from several sources that certain aspects of word learning that were
once thought to be special to word learning actually apply more generally.
!
If a child hears a word such as “koba” used to describe an object, she will
remember, a month later, which object was given this name. And if she hears the fact
“this was given to me by my uncle” used to describe an object, she will also remember, a
month later, which object has this property (Markson, 1999; Markson & Bloom, 1997).
Fast mapping works for both words and facts.
!
When children are given a novel name for an object and asked to extend the name,
they tend to generalize on the basis of object kind, often determined on the basis of shape
(e.g., Markman & Wachtel, 1988; Landau et al., 1988; Waxman & Booth, 2000). And
when children are shown an object and simply asked to find another one of the same
kind, they also tend to generalize on the basis of object kind, often determined on the
basis of shape (e.g., Diesendruck, 2001; Diesendruck & Bloom, under review).
Generalizing on the basis of kind, often determined by shape, is a general cognitive
practice, not one limited to words.
!
When children see an adult stare at an object and utter its name, they associate the
name with that object, even if they themselves were attending to a different object when
the word was spoken (Baldwin, 1991, 1993). And if children see an adult stare at an
object and look disgusted, they associate the negative emotion with that object even if
they themselves were looking at a different object when the adult made that expression
(Baldwin & Moses, 1994). Direction of gaze is a cue that children use when learning
many properties of objects, not just their names.
!
When children are given a new count noun and have to interpret its meaning, they
treat it as an object name, even if this is inconsistent with the grammar of the word (e.g.,
Macnamara, 1972; Markman & Wachtel, 1988). And when they are asked to count an
array, they tend to count the objects, even they are explicitly asked to do otherwise
(Shipley and Shepperson, 1990). The object bias holds any cognitive process that
requires individuation, not just word learning.
!
When children are given one word for an object (“This is a koba”) and asked about
a different word (“Where is the fendle?”), they tend to seek out a second object as a
referent for this different word (e.g., Markman & Wachtel, 1988). And when given one
fact about an object (“This is from my uncle”), and asked which object a different fact
applies to (“Where is the one dogs like to play with?”), they tend to seek out a second
object as corresponding to that fact (Diesendruck & Markson, in press). The “mutual
exclusivity” bias holds for communicative acts in general, not just for words.
These findings, taken together, support a very different perspective on word learning than
the one that motivates -- and is motivated by – ideas such as weird first words, a word
spurt, and ten new words a day. The view above is not actually inconsistent with these
myths. If a word spurt were to exist, for example, the above perspective might explain it as
the result of a sudden increase in theory of mind capacities, conceptual capacities, or
syntactic sensitivity. But it does not entail these myths – it is just as consistent with the
view that children start off learning words slowly and gradually get better at it. In any case,
regardless of which theory will turn out to be the right one, the study of word learning can
only benefit from an accurate understanding of development, one based on facts, not myths.
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