Word meaning biases or language-specific effects? Evidence from English, Spanish and Korean

Crosslinguistic acquisition of word meaning 1

WORD MEANING BIASES OR LANGUAGE-SPECIFIC EFFECTS?

EVIDENCE FROM ENGLISH, SPANISH, AND KOREAN

Virginia C. Mueller Gathercole

University of Wales Bangor

Haesik Min

State University of New York at Buffalo

Address for correspondence:

Virginia C. Mueller Gathercole

School of Psychology

University of Wales Bangor

Bangor, Gwynedd LL57 2DG

Wales

e-mail: [email protected]

This study was partially supported by a research grant from Florida International University, Miami, Florida,

and an honorary fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, University of Edinburgh,

Scotland. We are grateful for this support, and for comments on earlier drafts of this work from Lisa Cramer.


ABSTRACT

This study examines the hypothesis that children learning distinct languages will show differential

adherence to proposed word-meaning biases. English-, Spanish-, and Korean-speaking preschoolers were tested

for their extension of new nouns to referents that shared shape, substance, and/or functional properties with the

initial referent. English- and Spanish-speaking subjects performed differently from Korean-speaking children.

Korean speakers gave more substance-based responses than the other groups, and their responses took

functional information into account, while those of Spanish and English speakers did not. Results lend support

to the position that children's first best guesses about the meanings of new words are dependent on the structure

of the language they are learning, and they challenge the notion that children have universal word learning

biases.


Word meaning biases or language-specific effects? Evidence from English, Spanish, and Korean

This research is concerned with children's acquisition of word meaning. In particular, it addresses the

question of what influences children's categorisation of novel referents presented in conjunction with new

labels: To what extent is this categorisation affected by the linguistic input to the child--i.e., by the structure of

the language being acquired? A great deal of research on the acquisition of word meaning in recent years has

focused intensively on potential biases or principles children may apply in learning new words. A wealth of

proposals have argued that children employ a variety of principles that enable them to quickly determine the

probable meaning of a new form and that, thus, facilitate the acquisition of word meaning. This study aims at

examining the role that the native language may play in determining children's first guesses about the meanings

of new words and in creating those biases.

Research on the acquisition of word meaning in recent years has been concerned with Quine's (1960)

puzzle regarding acquisition through ostensive definition. When someone uses a new word (e.g., gavagai) in

reference to some item in the world (e.g., a rabbit), how does the child discover if that new word refers to the

whole object (the rabbit), a part of the object (the ears, the tail, a leg, etc.), the substance the object is made of

(fur, bones, flesh), some property of the object (furry, white, dirty), some state the object is in (quiet, sitting,

nervous), or even some action it is undertaking (eating, running, breathing)? The possibilities are limitless.

Various researchers have proposed that one answer to this dilemma is that children observe some

constraints or show some biases or strategies that narrow down the possibilities they will initially entertain for

the meaning of a new word. These biases or principles are purported to facilitate acquisition by enabling the

child to make a good first guess at the meaning of a new word. Among the constraints or biases or principles

that have been proposed are some that are specifically linguistic in nature: Clark's Principle of Contrast (Clark,

1980, 1983a, 1983b, 1987, 1988, 1990, 1993), the Principle of Mutual Exclusivity (Markman, 1987, 1991;

Merriman, 1986; Merriman & Bowman, 1989; Au & Glusman, 1990; Au & DeWitt, 1993), the N3C Principle

(Golinkoff, Bailey, Wenger, & Hirsh-Pasek, 1989; Golinkoff, Mervis, & Hirsh-Pasek, 1994), the Taxonomic

Constraint (Markman & Hutchinson, 1984; Waxman & Kosowski, 1990; Waxman, 1990), the Whole Object

bias (Markman, 1991--cf. Mervis' (1989) "Object Category as Referent" principle, Golinkoff, Bailey, Wenger,

& Hirsh-Pasek's (1989) "Object Scope" principle ), and a Shape Bias for count nouns (Landau, Smith, & Jones,

1988; Jones, Smith, & Landau, 1991; Smith, Jones, & Landau, 1992; Frank, Graham, Poulin-Dubois, 1993).

(See Gathercole, 1987, 1989; Nelson, 1988, 1989, 1990 for critiques of proposed biases and Behrend, 1990;


Kuczaj, 1990, for discussions.) The present study addresses in particular the Whole Object bias and shape bias

and examines the extent to which children observe such biases across languages.

The Whole Object bias predicts that, on hearing a novel noun in conjunction with an unfamiliar

referent, a child will assume that the label refers to the whole object, not to its parts, nor to the substance of

which it is made, nor to some other property. Work by Markman and her colleagues has provided evidence in

support of this position. Children have been shown to observe the Whole Object principle even in cases where

the salience of properties is heightened (Markman, 1991). When viewed in conjunction with the Taxonomic

principle (which predicts that children will extend words to items of the same category as the original referent),

the Whole Object bias predicts that children will extend a word for a new object to another whole object of the

same “category”. The shape bias predicts that children will extend new words to items sharing the same shape

(not texture, not size) as the original referent. Although these two proposed biases are not identical, they

certainly overlap, in that the identification of an object and its category is often dependent on or highly related to

shape, at least at the basic level (Rosch, Mervis, Gray, Johnson, & Boyes-Braem, 1976, Markman 1991,

Gathercole, Cramer, Somerville, & Jansen op de Haar, 1995). So the Whole Object bias, in conjunction with

the Taxonomic bias, would usually entail a shape bias.

The hypothesis to be tested here is that children who are acquiring distinct native languages may not all

exhibit effects consistent with such biases, or may exhibit such effects to differing degrees. That is, it is

hypothesized that the native language may play a role in determining which potential meanings of a new word a

child will entertain. Many of the studies that have been done to explore the proposed word-learning principles

have been conducted on English-speaking children, and it is possible that certain characteristics of English may

encourage English-learning children to observe a number of these biases more than children acquiring other

languages. This suggestion becomes more plausible with the observation that children's observance of the

proposed principles seems to increase with age (Merriman & Bowman, 1989; Landau, Smith, & Jones, 1988;

Baldwin, 1989), which raises the issue of where the proposed biases originate. (See Markman, 1992.) With

regard to the shape bias for count nouns, Landau, Smith, and Jones have suggested that this bias is learned from

language, in conjunction with count nouns and "does not stem from general perceptual processes" (Landau,

Smith, and Jones, 1988: 299). (However, see Ward, Becker, Hass, & Vela (1991) and Macario (1991).) The

study proposed here aims at an even more specific possibility--that the biases observed in the above studies

derive not so much from language per se but from the particular language being learned. Given that distinct


languages have distinct lexical properties, it is quite possible that children learning distinct languages will

exhibit the proposed biases to differing degrees. Recent work by Imai and Gentner (1993, in submission)

supports this possibility. (See also Au, Dapretto, & Song (1993); Gopnik & Choi (1990) for similar

speculations.) If so, this suggests that these biases may not reflect universal word-learning principles at all, but,

instead, language-specific organisational principles that the child has learned in acquiring this particular

language. That is, the principles may simply stem from language-specific linguistic knowledge the children

have gained from the particular language they are learning. Recent work in semantics (e.g., Lakoff, 1987; Lucy,

1992; Bowerman, 1994) suggests that the categories denoted by language are not "given" in the world, but are

constructed and imposed on the world by human beings. This opens the possibility that categories important for

and emphasized in English may be irrelevant to or nonexistent in another language.

The following sections present, first, some cross-linguistic differences that could influence children's

first guesses about the meanings of new words and then an experiment that bears on the predictions explored

here.

What properties of English might favour the Whole Object bias and the shape bias for count nouns?

One property, which will be the focus here, is the fact that English makes a distinction between count and mass

nouns. The mass-count distinction in English sorts nouns and their modifiers into two groups. (See Gathercole,

1986; papers in Pelletier, 1979, for discussions of the exact linguistic status of the Mass-Count distinction.)

What are traditionally called mass nouns are those that occur only in the singular, can occur in the singular

preceded by some or no article ("some rice fell on the floor", "rice tastes good"), and can occur with the

quantifiers much1, little, and less ("she wants that much rice", "the store sold little rice this week", "they sold

less rice than last week"). What are traditionally called count nouns are those that can occur in the singular

preceded by a ("a pea rolled off the table") or in the plural preceded by some or no article ("some peas fell on

the floor", "peas taste good"), and can occur with the quantifiers many and few ("she wants that many peas",

"the store sold few peas this week"). Both types of noun can occur preceded by the ("the rice", "the pea", "the

peas") and by several other determiners, including possessive adjectives ("my rice", "my pea", "my peas") and a

lot of ("a lot of peas/rice").

The linguistic mass-count distinction is correlated, albeit imperfectly, with an ontological distinction

between objects and substances. Typically, objects (e.g., trees, tables, animals) are named by count nouns and

occur in count contexts, and substances (e.g., water, clay, sand) are named by mass nouns and occur in mass

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contexts. In addition, as noted above, the identification of an object is often tied closely with a characteristic

shape for that type. The mass-count linguistic distinction in English may, thus, highlight for children a

referential distinction between objects and substances and, by extension, the importance of shape in the

identification of objects. Interestingly, 82% to 85% of the nouns present in young English-speaking children's

speech are count nouns (Gordon, 1988: 113). The mass-count distinction in English, along with the prevalence

of count nouns in early speech, may foster a Whole Object and a shape bias in English-speaking children.

Consequently, a good first guess English-speaking children might make about the use of a new noun is that it

refers to an object, not the substance of which it is made.

This property of English contrasts with what we find in other languages. The nominal systems in

Spanish and Korean exemplify two other ways in which languages encode reference to items in the world.

Neither of these languages has a linguistic mass-count distinction. All nouns have virtually the same privileges

of occurrence. However, there are important differences between Spanish and Korean in this regard. In

Spanish, any noun can generally be used in either of the types of contexts that distinguish mass and count nouns

in English: In principle, any noun can occur in the singular or plural, and all nouns can occur with the same

quantifiers. For example, one can say both (1) and (2), using the nouns pan ("bread") and mueble ("furniture")

in both the singular and plural; similarly, the quantifiers mucho(s) and poco(s) can occur with both singular and

plural forms of nouns, corresponding to English much and little in the singular and many and few in the plural,

as in (3).

(1) A mí me gusta el pan de Valencia.

"I like the bread from Valencia."

Suele comprar tres panes al día.

"S/he usually buys three (loaves of) bread per day."

(2) Ana compró el mueble grande para el salón.

"Ana bought the large (piece of) furniture for the living room."

Ana compró tres muebles grandes para el salón.

"Ana bought three large (pieces of) furniture for the living room."


(3) No tiene mucho pan.

"S/he does not have much bread."

No tiene muchos panes.

"S/he does not have many (loaves of) bread.

Tiene poco queso.

"S/he has little cheese."

Tiene pocos quesos.

"S/he has few (types of/balls of) cheese(s)."

The absence of a linguistic Mass/Count distinction in Spanish does not, of course, imply that Spanish

speakers cannot and do not make a cognitive distinction between substances and objects. It is just that their

language does not force them to classify every nominal form into one class or the other. It might be helpful to

draw an analogy with the distinction between grammatical and natural gender languages. In a grammatical

gender language, like Spanish or German, every noun is categorised by gender, and a competent speaker cannot

use any noun without assigning it to its appropriate gender. And that assignment has only an imperfect

relationship with the real-world gender of animate referents (see Gathercole & Hasson, 1995). In a natural

gender language, like English, on the other hand, only some nouns that refer to animate beings are marked for

gender, and that marking is always in concord with the real-world gender of the referent.

In like manner, we could call a language like English a "grammatical mass/count" language--every

noun is marked for mass/count status, and that status has only an imperfect correlation with the ontological

status of a referent. Or, rather, what distinguishes mass terms from count terms is not properties of their

referents, but, instead the way in which they lead us to view referents (Bunt, 1979; Zemach ,1979). English

guides the speaker-hearer in every instance to view a referent either as an individuable object (if the label occurs

in count contexts) or as a non-individuated substance (if the label occurs in mass contexts).

Conversely, a language like Spanish could be called a "natural mass/count" language. Nouns are not

strictly classified as mass or count. However, one can view referents as substances or individuated objects

without being forced to do so by the syntax of the language. If one views a referent as a substance, one can

refer to it and quantify it in the singular (mucho pan); if one views a referent as an object, one can refer to it and

quantify it in the plural (dos panes). In such a "natural mass/count" language, we can expect prototypical

substances (sand, water) to typically occur in the singular and prototypical objects (trees, people) to be

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quantified in the plural. However, it is not the language that is forcing that choice.

A somewhat different structure is found in languages like Korean, Japanese, and Chinese. In these

languages, nouns typically occur in the singular only. To undergo quantification, a Nominal Measure

Word/Noun Classifier (Sharvy, 1978; Lakoff, 1987) must be used, as if to lend "countability" to the referent.

One says, e.g., (4), not (5), in Japanese, using the classifier hon (pon), generally used for long thin objects (see

below), and (6), not (7), in Korean, using the similar classifiers caru and tae.

(4) Empitsu o gohon kudasai.

"Please give me five hon pencil(s)."

Tabako o gohon kudasai.

"Please give me five hon cigarette(s)."

(5) *Empitsu o go kudasai.

*Tabako o go kudasai.

(6) Yonp'il tasot caru-(rul) cu-se-yo.

pencil five classifier-DO give-honorific-sentence marker

"Please give (me) five caru pencil(s)"

Na-ege tambae tasot tae-(rul) cu-se-yo

me-to cigarette five classifier-DO give-honorific-sentence marker

"Please give me five tae cigarette(s)."

(7) *Yonp'il tasot cu-se-yo.

*Na-ege tambae tasot cu-se-yo.

This means that regular nouns in these languages are more like English mass nouns than like count nouns. Only

with the use of noun classifiers can quantification (and, hence, individuation) occur.

How might this cross-linguistic difference affect children's first guesses about the meanings of new

words? Let us first consider Spanish. There are two alternative predictions one might make. Under a first

hypothesis, the fact that Spanish does not differentiate mass and count nouns may mean that Spanish-speaking

children are less likely to pay attention to an object-substance dichotomy than English-speaking children.

Spanish-speaking children may thus show less of a Whole Object or shape bias than English-speaking children.

In other words, the object-substance dichotomy in English, along with the preponderance of count nouns in

children's early vocabularies, may be critical in drawing English-speaking children's attention to objects as

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referents of nouns and may be responsible for the Whole Object bias observed in English-speaking children.

The absence of this dichotomy in Spanish may have the effect that Spanish-speaking children will be less likely

than English-speaking children to show a Whole Object bias in the acquisition of new nouns.

An alternative, second, hypothesis draws on the fact that every noun in Spanish can in theory occur in

the singular or plural. This makes Spanish nouns akin to English count nouns--every item in the world can be

viewed as individuable and countable. If this is true, an alternative hypothesis is exactly the opposite to the

first: Spanish-speaking children will be more likely than English-speaking children to assume new nouns refer

to whole objects, not to the substance of which they are made or some other property.

The case of Korean is slightly different. Korean nouns are more like English mass nouns, and

individuation is specified outside the noun. Korean-speaking children may well favour a substance reading in

their first guesses about the meanings of new nouns, or at least show less of an object or shape bias than their

English-speaking counterparts. (See Imai & Gentner, 1993, in submission, for support for a similar hypothesis

regarding Japanese-speaking children.)

The present study aims at testing these hypotheses. It draws on a previous study by Gathercole,

Cramer, Somerville, and Jansen op de Haar (1995) and tests whether Spanish- and Korean-speaking children,

when compared with English-speaking children, perform in a fashion that is consistent with these predictions.

In Gathercole et al (1995), children's adherence to word meaning biases were examined in contexts in which

such biases might conflict with syntactic cues or functional information about the referents. In that study,

children were shown initial stimuli that had well-defined shapes but homogeneous makeup. These stimuli were

given novel names and were presented in a number of conditions that varied by functional information provided

about the initial stimulus and by the syntactic frames in which the new word was presented. The child was

asked in each case to extend the new name beyond the initial referent either to a referent with the same shape as,

but different material makeup from, the initial referent or to a referent with the same material makeup as, but

different shape from, the initial referent. (Choices of the former would be consistent with a Whole Object or

shape bias.)

It was found that overall, children's responses favoured same-shape choices in only two conditions,

when count syntax was used with no functional information or when count syntax was used with shape-linked

functional information provided. It was also found that children took account of syntactic cues, when these

were given alone, without functional information: They were more likely to extend a word introduced with mass


syntax to an item with the same material makeup as the original referent, and a word with count syntax to an

item with the same shape. However, the children generally did not take functional information into account in

their extensions of the new words (although follow-up research (Gathercole and Cramer, in submission) shows

that with greater experience with the functional properties of referents, they do, especially if the function is

shape-linked). Finally, it was found that children were influenced by the idiosyncratic properties of the

referents--i.e., with some items, the words were virtually always extended on the basis of similarity of shape,

whereas with some other items, the words were virtually always extended on the basis of similarity of material

makeup.

These results indicate that young English-speaking children are attentive in such a task to syntax and

referential properties of referents, but not functional information. The English-speaking child may overlook the

functional information because he or she has been "prepared" by the language to expect new nouns to refer to

whole, individuable objects, unless the syntax tells otherwise.

The question that is addressed here is whether Spanish and Korean subjects will perform differently in

a similar type of task. Specifically, when presented with new nouns for novel stimuli, and given functional

information for those stimuli, will Spanish- and Korean-speaking children's response patterns resemble those of

English-speaking children, or will their responses differ in ways that are consistent with predictions based on the

structure of Spanish and Korean? The specific predictions one might make are the following:

a. Spanish-speaking children will either show less of a Whole Object/shape bias or more of such a bias than

English-speaking children. (1) The former would be the case if the Whole Object/shape bias in English-

speaking children is an effect of the mass/count distinction "alerting" English-speaking children to pay attention

to an object/substance dichotomy; the absence of this distinction in Spanish would mean Spanish-speaking

children would come less "prepared"/"ready" to focus on this dichotomy. (2) The latter would be the case if the

Whole Object/shape bias in English-speaking children is an effect of the predominance of count nouns, which

may lead children to assume that nouns in general usually refer to individuable objects; the fact that any noun in

principle in Spanish can occur in the singular or plural would mean that Spanish-speaking children might

assume that all referents can be treated as individuable objects.

b. Under prediction (1a), we might expect Spanish-speaking children to pay more attention to functional

information than English-speaking children. They would come with fewer "pre-conceived" notions of the

categorisation of referents and be more receptive to suggestions arising from outside the noun or the reference


itself. Under prediction (1b), on the other hand, we could expect Spanish-speaking children to ignore functional

information as much as, or more than, English-speaking children do.

c. Korean-speaking children should show less of a Whole Object/shape bias than English-speaking children,

since nouns are more "mass"-like than "count"-like.

d. In addition, since the normal indication of countability/individuability is marked externally to the noun in

Korean, Korean-speaking children may be more attentive to functional information in deciding on the extension

of a new noun.

To explore these predictions, the following experiment was conducted. Spanish-, Korean-, and

English-speaking children were given tasks identical to those of the shape-linked and substance-linked tasks of

Gathercole et al (1995). Because Spanish and Korean do not have mass/count syntax, the nouns were presented

in a single syntactic frame, comparable to that used in the neutral syntactic frame condition for English in the

previous study.

METHOD

Subjects: Subjects were 48 children, 16 each for each language, Spanish, Korean, and English. The Spanish-

speaking subjects (12 females, 4 males) were reported by their parents to speak "only Spanish", were living in

homes where Spanish was the dominant language, and were attending Spanish-language preschools in Miami,

Florida; the Korean-speaking subjects (8 males, 8 females) were recent arrivals to the U.S. and lived in homes in

which only Korean was spoken, in Miami, Florida, or Buffalo, N.Y.; the English-speaking subjects (6 males, 10

females) were monolingual English-speaking children in North Wales. One other English-speaking subject was

dropped because of a left response bias.

The Spanish-speaking subjects had a mean age of 4;3 (range: 3;1 to 5;2); the Korean-speaking subjects

had a mean age of 3;8 (range: 2;10 to 4;6); the English-speaking subjects had a mean age of 3;9 (range: 3;0 to

4;10).

Half of the children in each language group were assigned to each of the function conditions.

Stimuli:

Non-linguistic stimuli: The initial stimulus items, along with the two items presented as choices, one

matching the initial stimulus in shape, the other in material, were virtually identical to those used in Gathercole,

Cramer, Somerville, and Jansen-op-de-Haar (1995).2 One choice matched the initial stimulus in shape but not

in material makeup, the other matched it in material makeup but not shape, as shown in Table 1. In addition to


these nine test items, 6 warm-up items were used. In two of these, the choices consisted of one item that was

identical to the initial stimulus and one that had nothing in common with it; in two others, the choices consisted

of one item that shared shape with the initial item and the other had nothing in common with it; and in the final

two, the choices consisted of one item that shared material makeup with the initial item and the other had

nothing in common with it.

These stimuli were presented in two conditions. In one, subjects were shown a Substance-linked

Function for the initial stimulus, in the other a Shape-linked Function. The former highlighted the material of

which the item was made, the latter its shape. The Substance- and Shape-linked uses for each item are shown in

Table 2.

PLACE TABLES 1 AND 2 ABOUT HERE.

Linguistic stimuli: For the test items, nine nonsense words were used in each language. For Spanish,

these were blica, estida, mela, cufela, dofa, tanina, fifina, tulveca, and tiva; the forms used for Korean were

kadae, t'aemi, moobo, horoo, soni, ap'u, cangchae, not'o, and paesa; for English, blicket, stad, mell, coodle, doff,

tannin, fiffin, tulver, and tiv were used. For warm-ups, vongla, bima, espefa, lanira, daca, and torvela were used

in Spanish; loka, t'udo, choshin, taemoo, k'oba, and nachoo were used in Korean; and wongle, bim, speff,

lanner, dack, and torvel were used in English.

Neutral nominal syntactic frames were used in all languages: In Spanish,

(8) Esto es mi X. Dale al oso su X.

"This is my X. Give the bear his/her X."

In Korean,

(9) i-kot-un onni-kun-te, irum-i X-ya

this-thing/stuff-Top. sister-Gen-Conn, name-Nom X-be Dec.

"This is sister's and (its) name is X."

kuromyon cwidori (cwisuni) X-nun onu-ko-ci?

then mouse (M/F) X-Top which-thing/stuff-Q

"Then which one is the mouse's (M/F) X?"

In English,

(10) This is my X. Give the bear his/her X.

Procedure: Each child was seen individually. Subjects and the experimenter were seated at a small table or on


the floor, on which was seated a stuffed bear or mouse. All children were told (in the relevant language), "Do

you know what we're going to do? We're going to look at what's in the boxes. They're things you probably

haven't seen before, and they're stuff that's kind of funny. I'm going to show you what I have and the

bear/mouse always wants something like what I have. And you get to choose something similar for the

bear/mouse, OK?"

The experimenter proceeded to present the warm-up items, followed by the test items. Each item was

presented one by one. The child was shown either the Substance-linked or Shape-linked Function for each item,

and then was asked to give the bear or mouse his or her X.

For the test items, four distinct orders of presentation were used. These were designed with the

constraints that no item could occur as the first or the last item in more than one ordering and that no two items

could follow one another more than once across orderings. Nonsense names were assigned so that each test

item received a different name across the four orders of presentation. Placement of choices on the child's right

or left was balanced across subjects within each condition.

RESULTS

Each child was scored for the number of same-shape choices he or she made, out of 9. Preliminary

analyses revealed no difference in responses by order, so orders were collapsed in all subsequent analyses. Two

sets of analyses were conducted, the first to examine the major variables of the study, the second to examine

performance by item type.

For the first set of analyses, children’s scores were analysed using an ANOVA in which Language and

Function (Shape-linked, Substance-linked) were between subjects variables. The first analysis compared the

performance of the English-speaking subjects here ("New English") with that of the English-speaking subjects

in the comparable conditions [Shape-linked and Substance-linked Neutral syntax conditions] of Gathercole et al.

(1995) ("Old English"). Results revealed no significant differences in performance, although there was a slight

trend for the English-speaking subjects here to give more same-shape responses (mean: 5.8) than the previous

group (mean: 4.8). (For Language, F(1,28)=3.7, p=.07.) Hence, the New English subjects here (from North

Wales) performed in a fashion similar to the Old English subjects (from Phoenix) and, like them, showed no

difference in performance in the distinct Function conditions.

The main analysis compared the performance of the three Language groups here (Spanish, Korean,

English) by Function, shown in Table 3. There was a main effect of Language, F (2, 42) = 6.3, p<.004, and of


Function, F (1, 42) = 4.7, p<.04. There was no interaction of Language by Function. Student-Newman-Keuls

tests revealed that Spanish and English speakers performed significantly differently from Korean speakers,

p<.05, with the latter giving fewer same-shape responses than the former.

The significant effect of Function reveals that subjects made more shape-based choices in the Shape-

linked Function condition than in the Substance-linked Function condition. Further analysis of the performance

within the individual languages reveals that the effect of Function was primarily due to the Korean-speaking

children, who were the only language group who showed a significant difference in performance in the Shape-

linked vs. Substance-linked Function conditions: Korean: F (1,42) = 6.8, p<.02. The only other pair-wise

comparisons that were significant were that both Spanish and English speakers performed significantly

differently from the Korean speakers in the Substance-linked condition, where the Korean speakers gave fewer

same-shape responses: E vs. K: F(1,42)=9.5, p<.004, S vs. K: F(1,42)=10.6, p<.003.

PLACE TABLE 3 ABOUT HERE.

These results reveal, first, that there was no difference in performance between the English- and

Spanish-speaking children. Second, the Spanish- and English-speaking children gave more same-shape

responses than the Korean-speaking children. Finally, the Korean-speaking children were affected by the

Function being demonstrated, while the Spanish- and English-speaking children were not.

A second set of analyses focused on the performance by type of item. In Gathercole et al. (1995), it

was found, first, that children's responses were significantly influenced by the type of item presented, with a

high of 82% same-shape choices for the dowel, to a low of 6% same-shape choices for the bubble plastic. There

was a continuum across the individual items, but they could be classified into three groups: Some items had

over 60% same-shape responses ("shape-favouring items": dowel, magnet, sandpaper cylinder, and caulking

cord); some over 60% same-substance responses ("substance-favouring items": bubble plastic, splat ball, and air

conditioning filter); and some neither ("intermediate items": hyper-colour material and Super Sculpey). The

second set of analyses aimed to determine whether the item-based responding observed in Gathercole et al. was

paralleled in the responses of the children studied here, and most importantly, whether any parallels found were

observed across all three languages.

Children's responses by Language for the individual items are shown in Figure 1. Data from the

comparable conditions of the previous study are included for comparison. The first analyses examined whether

there was any correlation in the patterns of responding across the three languages, and relative to the responses


reported in the previous study. Results revealed that there was a high correlation between the Old English and

New English responses (r=.79, p<.02, df=7), between the Old English and Spanish responses (r=.79, p<.02,

df=7), between the New English and Spanish responses (r=.85, p<.01, df=7), but not between the responses of

any of these groups and those of the Korean subjects. Thus, the responses were influenced by the individual

stimuli in comparable ways across all the groups except the Korean group .

PLACE FIGURE 1 ABOUT HERE.

A second set of analyses examined responses according to the grouping of items into shape-favouring

items, substance-favouring items, and intermediate items. A set of ANOVA's were conducted to determine

whether there was any effect of Language or Function within each item type. A first set of analyses used these

groupings as observed in Gathercole et al.

For shape-favouring items, there was an effect of Language (F (2,42) = 7.7, p<.002), but not of

Function nor of Language by Function. Student-Newman-Keuls reveals that both the English- and Spanish-

speaking children had significantly more same-shape responses than Korean-speaking children (S: 91%, E:

83%, K: 49%, out of 4). Pair-wise comparisons revealed that this difference held in both Function conditions.

(In the Shape-linked Function condition, E (88%) vs. K (50%): F(1,42) = 8.2, p<.007; S (78%) vs. K: F(1,42) =

4.6, p<.04; in the Substance-linked Function condition, E (78%) vs. K (47%): F(1,42) = 5.6, p<.03; S (75%) vs.

K: F(1,42) = 4.5, p<.04.)

For substance-favouring items, there was a significant effect of Function (F(1,42) = 5.6, p<.03), but not

of Language nor of Language by Function. Further analysis revealed that only the Korean-speaking subjects

differed significantly in their responses in the Shape-linked versus Substance-linked Function conditions:

Korean (59% vs. 22%): F(1,42) = 7.9, p<.008 (Spanish: 55% vs. 46%; English: 54% vs. 46%).

For intermediate items, there was no significant main effect. However, individual language data show

a near-significant difference by Function within the Korean group: Shape-linked Function: 64% vs. Substance-

linked Function: 28% (F(1,42) = 4.0, p=.051). (English Shape-linked: 56%, Substance-linked: 44%; Spanish

Shape-linked: 39%, Substance-linked: 58%.)

These results reveal that within the individual item types, the data are consistent with the overall results

of the study. First, the response patterns of the English- and Spanish-speaking children did not differ. Second,

with the shape-favouring items, the Korean-speaking children gave fewer same-shape responses than the

Spanish- and English-speaking children. And, third, with the substance-favouring and intermediate items, the


Korean-speaking children's responses varied by the Functions associated with them, while those of the Spanish-

and English-speaking children did not.

It might be argued that these groupings of the items into shape-favouring, substance-favouring, and

intermediate may not be valid for the subjects here, since these groupings were based on the data from the

English-speaking subjects of Gathercole et al., and from all conditions in that study. For this reason, each of the

present groups' responses were examined in order to identify which items fell into which category for each

group, based on 60% or more same-shape responses, 60% or more same-substance responses, or neither. The

distribution is as shown in Table 4, which includes information from the comparable conditions of Gathercole et

al. Table 4 shows a high level of agreement across the English and Spanish speakers and disagreement between

them and the Korean speakers in the classification of the individual items. This is not surprising, given the high

correlation reported above across items for English and Spanish speakers, but the lack of a correlation between

the Korean speakers and the others.


In order to explore the extent to which the above item results may be an artefact of the classification

according to the Old English data, each language group's patterns of responding were taken, and separate

ANOVA's were conducted to determine the extent to which Language and Function played a role in the

responses within each category, under these alternative groupings. E.g., one analysis focused on responses to

only those items that are shape-favouring for Spanish-speaking subjects (dowel, caulking cord, splat ball,

magnet, sandpaper); another on responses to only those items that are substance-favouring for Korean-speaking

subjects; another on responses to only those items that are intermediate for the New English-speaking subjects

here; etc. (Groups for which there was only a single item--e.g., Spanish substance-favouring--were not

analysed.)

Significant results are shown in Table 5, along with those based on the Old English patterns, reported

above. These results show, first, that in the shape-favouring groupings, Korean-speaking children gave

significantly fewer same-shape responses than either the English- or Spanish-speaking subjects. (One exception

is in the Korean shape-favouring group, which contained two items that belonged to every other language's

shape-favouring group as well.) This is as might be expected, given the much lower incidence of same-shape

responses overall by Korean-speaking subjects. More interesting, perhaps, is the findings observed in nearly

every grouping for Substance-favouring or Intermediate items. It can be seen that in every case involving 3 or


more items, and in one involving 2 items, regardless of the grouping, it was found that the Korean subjects gave

significantly more same-shape responses in the Shape-linked Function condition than in the Substance-linked

Function condition. This contrasts with the lack of any significant results involving Function for either the

English- or Spanish-speaking children.


These results support the findings above: Spanish- and English-speaking children performed similarly,

they gave more same-shape responses than Korean-speaking children, and Korean-speaking children

consistently responded according to the Function being demonstrated, while the Spanish- and English-speaking

children did not.

DISCUSSION

The results of this experiment provide some initial support for the hypothesis that children's first best

guesses about the meanings of new words will be influenced by language-specific characteristics of the

language they are learning.

First, the results reveal that Korean children perform significantly differently from both English- and

Spanish-speaking children. Korean-speaking children are less likely to extend new words to a same-shaped

stimulus than English- and Spanish-speaking children. This holds both in general, and for individual items.

Korean-speaking children showed substance-favouring response patterns for five of the nine stimuli and shape-

favouring response patterns for only two of the nine. Each of the English- and Spanish-speaking groups, in

contrast, showed shape-favouring response patterns for five of the nine stimuli and substance-favouring

response patterns for only one of the nine stimuli. These findings are consistent with the predictions above that

the Korean-speaking children would give more substance-based responses than their English-speaking

counterparts.

The Korean-speaking children also differed from the other two language groups in that they

consistently took account of functional information in determining the extendibility of a new noun, while

neither of the other groups did at all. This outcome is consistent with the second prediction regarding Korean-

speaking children, that they may be more attentive to functional properties in extending the use of a new word

than English-speaking children.

The results for the Spanish-speaking children showed no significant difference in the performance of

the Spanish- and English-speaking groups. These groups showed similar levels of same-shape choices, they


showed similar patterns in their responses to the individual items, and neither group took the functional

properties of the items into account for extending the new names. It had been predicted that either English-

speaking children would be more likely to extend on the basis of similarity of shape than Spanish-speaking

children or Spanish-speaking children might show same-shape extensions more than English-speaking children.

The results fail to support either of these alternatives. Although it is not entirely clear why the results of these

two groups should be so similar--especially given the marked difference between these two groups and the

Korean group--one possible explanation suggests itself.

One characteristic that English and Spanish have in common (and do not share with Korean) is that

they both have obligatory marking of the singular-plural distinction. It may be that that distinction alone is

enough to alert children to the countability/individuability of referents of nouns. Since, as noted above, such a

high percentage of early nouns in English-speaking children's speech are count nouns, the earliest experiences

of English- and Spanish-speaking children with nouns may not be drastically different. With this in mind, the

similarity in the performance of the English- and Spanish-speaking children is attributable not to the Spanish

speakers' failure to perform at a level higher than the English speakers, but to the English speakers' failure to

perform at a level lower than the Spanish speakers. That is, the English speakers do not seem to be influenced

as much by the count-mass contrast itself as by the singular-plural contrast included within count syntax.

This would also explain the similarity in the English- and Spanish-speakers' lack of attention to the

functional properties of items to determine extendibility beyond the initial referent. If both language groups

have learned from the singular-plural contrast in their languages that nouns refer to individuable, countable

objects, then functional information could be viewed as incidental.

What is a little more difficult to explain is the marked similarity in the Spanish- and English-speaking

children's responses to the individual items. However, when we examine the item-based response patterns

across all the language groups, shown in Table 4, it is quite clear that even though there is a significant

difference in the pattern found for the English- and Spanish-speaking children relative to the Korean-speaking

children, the patterns do overlap, especially at the extremes. That is, the patterns do not appear totally

haphazard: the two items for which the Korean-speaking children showed shape-favouring responses are a

subset of the five items for which the New English- and Spanish-speaking children showed shape-favouring

responses; similarly, the few items for which the English- and Spanish-speaking children showed substance-

favouring responses are a subset of those for which the Korean-speaking children showed substance-favouring


responses. This suggests the following: idiosyncratic aspects of the referents are drawing children's attention.

Some are so extreme that they draw all children's attention in the same direction--these are the few cases in

which there is overlap on the two extreme ends (dowel, splat ball; a.c. filter). One or two are ambiguous enough

that children from the same language background differ in their classification of that item (e.g., the super

sculpey). For those items whose properties lead to less definitive categorization, the children's responses have

to be "pulled" away from the response mode that they have learned through their language to favour. For

Korean-speaking children, the favoured response mode is to extend a noun on the basis of substance; for

English- and Spanish-speaking children, the favoured response mode is to extend a noun on the basis of shape.

This would explain the high correlation between the Spanish- and English-speaking children's patterns

of responding. Given their expectation that nouns will refer to individuable, countable entities, they are more

likely than not to extend new nouns on the basis of shape. Only entities whose idiosyncratic properties are

clearly at variance with that expectation (e.g., the bubble plastic) (or compelling outside information such as

syntactic information) will lead the child to deviate from shape-based responses towards substance-based

responses.

If this explanation is correct, it does not mean that English- and Spanish-speaking children have a

Whole Object or Shape "bias". Rather, the position being proposed here is that the children have simply learned

something about the way in which their language works. It makes no more sense to say that English- and

Spanish-speaking children have a bias in this direction than to say that English-speaking children have a "bias"

to add -ed to verbs to refer to the past. Similarly, we would not want to say that the Korean-speaking children

have a "substance bias". Instead, they, too, are relying on what they have already learned about language to

make sense of new language they are confronted with.

The results of this study, thus, suggest the following:

1. Spanish provides Spanish-speaking children with a model for nouns that indicates that, in principle, all

referents are countable. Every noun can, in principle, be pluralized, so the referents of those nouns can always

be viewed as individuable. A good first guess for a Spanish-speaking child, then, is that a new noun is

extendible to objects of the same shape as the original referent. Functional information appears relatively

incidental, at least with the level of functional experience provided in a single session such as this.

2. English provides a model in which nouns dictate that a referent should be viewed either as an individuable

object or as a non-individuable substance. But young children's greatest experience is with count nouns, rather


than mass nouns. So, in the absence of reliable information to sway them in one direction or another, a good

guess for English-speaking children about the meaning of a new word is that it will refer to the whole object and

is extendible to objects of the same shape as the initial referent. One type of information that will influence this

first best guess is syntactic information; with mass syntax they will make more same-substance extensions than

with count syntax. Functional information, on the other hand, appears more incidental, although with greater

experience with the functional properties of items, children's extensions can take this into consideration

(Gathercole & Cramer, in submission).

3. Korean provides a model in which nouns refer to the nature of a referent, without including in that encoding

any individuability of the referent. Individuability gets expressed via a route that is external to the noun itself,

through noun classifiers. The results above suggest that the nature of the referent is generally viewed as less

"object-like" by Korean-speaking children than by Spanish- and English-speaking children. In addition,

Korean-speaking children appear more "open" to the possibility that functional information can influence the

categorisation of a new referent and lead to extension of a new name either to a same-shaped object or a same-

material substance.

Results such as these should lead us to re-evaluate the word biases that have been proposed for word

learning. These data suggest that such "biases" may reflect and be an outgrowth of the child's growing

knowledge about how words work and what words do in the particular language he or she is learning.


TABLE 1

Initial Stimuli and Choices Available for Each Stimulus Item CHOICES Initial Stimulus 1. Magnet in rectangular shape 2. "Hyper-colour" material* sewn into the shape of a cup cover 3. Sand paper cylindrical tube 4. Wooden dowel 5. Sheet of bubble plastic, rectangular 6. Length of caulking cord, ribbed with 6 channels 7. Pocket made of black air conditioner filter 8. Splat ball** 9. Super Sculpey, in cone shape

Same Material Cube-shaped magnet Flat 8-shaped piece of hyper-colour material Flat rectangular piece of sand paper Pyramid-shaped piece of wood Ball of bubble plastic Ball of caulking cord substance Flat sheet of air conditioner filter Small cube-shaped piece of splat ball Cube-shaped Super Sculpey

Same Shape and Size Rectangular piece of wood Velvet sewn into the shape of a cup cover Metal cylindrical tube Copper dowel Foam rubber sheet, rectangular Length of blue ribbed material, with 6 channels Pocket made of vinyl Transparent plastic ball Plastic cone

* "Hyper Colour" material changes colour when touched or blown on, due to body heat. ** Splat balls are gelatinous balls that can be thrown against a wall, whereupon they stick to the wall and then "crawl" down it.


TABLE 2

Initial Stimulus Items and their Substance- and Shape-linked Functions FUNCTION Initial Stimulus 1. Magnet in rectangular shape 2. "Hyper-colour" material sewn into the shape of a cup cover 3. Sand paper cylindrical tube 4. Wooden dowel 5. Sheet of bubble plastic, rectangular 6. Length of caulking cord, ribbed with 6 channels 7. Pocket made of black air conditioner filter 8. Splat ball 9. Super Sculpey, in cone shape

Substance-linked Use Pick up paper clips Blow on it & it changes colour "Cleans" piece of wood Floats on water Pop bubbles Picks up confetti Strains water w/ confetti in it Throw at wall and sticks on wall Holds plastic sword tooth-picks; stick one end in

Shape-linked Use Stencil Cup cover Tube to look through Pushes piece of cotton (cotton wool) through clear plastic tube Mattress for small doll Road for car Holds handful of toy animals Acts as "cap" to hold unruly ribbon in a small canister Holds ring


23

TABLE 3

Mean Number Same-shape Choices by Language and Function

(standard deviation in parentheses)

LANGUAGE SHAPE-LINKED FUNCTION SUBSTANCE-LINKED FUNCTION

English 6.3 (1.8) 5.4 (.5)

Spanish 5.5 (1.8) 5.5 (1.3)

Korean 5.0 (1.8) 3.0 (1.4)


24


25


26


27

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Footnotes

1One reviewer noted that most dialects do not allow a bare much to occur before a noun,

without a determiner (too, so, that, etc.) preceding it. (One exception is in the negative: "We

don't have much rice".) The important point is that when a positive-pole quantifier is chosen

with a mass noun, it is much that is used, not many. See Bresnan 1973, Gathercole 1979. 2The only difference was in the same-material choice for the wooden dowel. Here, a

pyramid-shaped piece of wood was used, instead of a log-shaped piece.

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Word meaning biases or language-specific effects? Evidence from English, Spanish and Korean

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