Acquiring Non-Object Terms: The Case for Time Words

Abstract

We address the issue of children's understanding of abstract words with two studies on preschoolers' knowledge of the time-duration words minutes, hours, days, and years. The first study examines 4- and 5-year-olds' ability to answer questions about durations of common phenomena with duration terms. The second study examines 4- to 6-year-olds' comprehension of duration terms with a forced-choice pointing task. Both show that preschoolers' knowledge of such words is incomplete, but that it adheres to the pattern proposed in previous work with toddlers for abstract words. More specifically, children form lexical domains for such words even before they know their individual meanings, thereby allowing the children to often respond appropriately but not usually correctly to questions about abstract dimensions like time.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

We thank the schools, parents, and children who took part in this research. Their participation is vital to our work. This research was supported in part by a U.S. Department of Homeland Security graduate fellowship to the second author and NICHD Grant #1R03HD05522201Al to the third author.

Notes

¹Closed-class words generally serve a grammatical or functional role in a sentence (Hoff, 2009).

²Despite the fairly low exact agreement percentage, the quantity-term choices of adults were usually reasonable and within relatively small ranges, with only occasional outliers; for example, within 1 to 5 days for the couple going camping or 1 to 3 hours for children watching a movie. The one exception was the trial, “puppies growing up to be mommy dogs,” for which two-thirds of adults said “5” or “6” years. We elected to go with the slightly more reasonable number of 4 (only one adult having responded “1”).

Marilyn Shatz is now Professor Emeriti, University of Michigan, and adjunct professor, University of North Carolina Wilmington. Medha Tare is now at the University of Virginia. Tess Young is now at the University of Wyoming.