Abstract
Children must be willing to accept some of what they hear “on faith,” even when that testimony conflicts with their own expectations. The study reported here investigated the relation among vocabulary size, object recognition, and 24-month-olds' (N = 40) willingness to accept potentially surprising testimony about the category to which an object belongs. Results showed that children with larger vocabularies were better able to recognize atypical exemplars of familiar categories than children with smaller vocabularies. However, they were also most likely to accept unexpected testimony that an object that looked like a member of one familiar category was actually a member of another. These results indicate that 24-month-olds trust classifications provided by adult labeling patterns even when they conflict with the classifications children generate on their own.
Notes
aAverage percentage of participants in each condition reported by parents to “definitely” understand each artifact label. Note that the percentages rise to at least 95% in each cell if the criterion is relaxed to “maybe” understands each label.
a n = 20.
*Significantly different from chance of 50%, p < .01.
1In her study investigating the recognition of shape caricatures, CitationSmith (2003) analyzed results according to whether children had more or fewer than 100 object names in their productive vocabulary. We were unable to use the same cutoff because this study involved children who were, on average, 4 months older; as a result, only 2 children had fewer than 100 object names in their productive vocabulary (1 in the label condition and 1 in the no-label condition). Additionally, whereas Smith used object names in her criteria, we found the same pattern of results when analyses were based on all vocabulary items on the CDI, and so have chosen to report the latter here.
aMedian productive vocabulary was 419 words.
2I thank an anonymous reviewer for pointing out these alternative possibilities.