The Shape of Things: The Origin of Young Children’s Knowledge of the Names and Properties of Geometric Forms

Abstract

How do toddlers learn the names of geometric forms? Previous work suggests that preschoolers have fragmentary knowledge and that defining properties are not understood until well into elementary school. The current study investigated when children first begin to understand shape names and how they apply those labels to unusual instances. We tested 25- and 30-month-old children’s (N = 30 each) understanding of names for canonical shapes (commonly encountered instances, e.g., equilateral triangles), noncanonical shapes (more irregular instances, e.g., scalene triangles), and embedded shapes (shapes within a larger picture, e.g., triangular slices of pizza). At 25 months, children knew very few names, including those for canonical shapes. By 30 months, however, children had acquired more shape names and were beginning to apply them to some of the less typical instances of the shapes. Possible mechanisms driving this initial development of shape knowledge and implications of that development for school readiness are explored.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The authors would like to thank Nancy Jordan and Marcia Halperin for their consultation on this project and Natalie Brezack, Alicia Chang, Raissa Dempsey, Gabrielle Farmer, Maya Marzouk, Sujeet Ranganathan, and Katherine Ridge for their help on various aspects of the project.

ORCID

Brian N. Verdine

http://orcid.org/0000-0002-5350-5323

Roberta M. Golinkoff

http://orcid.org/0000-0003-3299-9720

Nora S. Newcombe

http://orcid.org/0000-0002-7044-6046

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by the National Institutes of Health Stimulus Grant No. 1RC1HD0634970-01 to Roberta Michnick Golinkoff at the University of Delaware and Kathryn Hirsh-Pasek at Temple University and the National Science Foundation via the Spatial Intelligence and Learning Center (SBE-1041707).