A unique study has shed exciting new light on how young children begin to understand the meaning of words.
The findings of researchers from the University of Manchester are published in the journal Child Development.
Children start saying words around their first birthday and for a while they only say one word at a time, although they build their vocabulary rapidly in their second year.
But the researchers found that they don’t do that by adding a full form of new words to their own personal lexicon.
Instead, they put a new word into their lexicon that has some, but not all, meaning, slowly tuning it in as they hear more language.
To show how children do this, researchers set up a study at Manchester Museum, working with a group of three to eight-year-olds.
An experimenter made either 4 stacked blocks or 4 lined blocks on a table, and then children were asked to respond to different-sized words by making a bigger, smaller, or taller version.
The researchers compared how their structure differed from the experimenter’s structure on each dimension, using mathematical modeling to describe the types of changes the children made and how the patterns differed by age.
Three- and four-year-olds tended to treat bigger, smaller, and taller with the same meaning: they built things that were bigger in all directions.
“It seems that when children first learn words, they get a general idea of what they mean – in this case, that the words mean change in size,” said co-author Dr Alissa Ferry, a lecturer at the University of Manchester.
“It seems that this is how we end up with children calling a cow a dog or apples a whole fruit, even though they’ve never heard an adult do that. But with more experience, they coordinate the meanings of their words.
“We think all children go through this process of refining word meanings, but which words are refined and when depends on what they hear around them.”
“Size words,” explained co-author Dr Katherine Twomey, also from the University of Manchester, “are harder to learn because they describe relationships between all different kinds of objects, which makes it harder to find what’s in common.
“This makes it easier for us to see how meaning changes with age.”
By about age 5, children generally understood that smaller meant they should use fewer blocks.
But it wasn’t until the age of seven or so that they reliably understood that taller really meant bigger, but specifically in the “up” direction.
Most of the 3-year-olds made bigger things when the researchers asked for smaller ones, although some of them seemed to do it faster than others.
It wasn’t until he was about 7 years old that most of the kids knew that taller specifically meant “up.”
However, some 3- and 4-year-olds appeared to already know that taller meant “up,” likely because they were exposed to these words more often in conversations with their caregivers.
Learning a language is a uniquely human experience. kids just get it from exposure to it. However, we don’t know exactly how this happens, which is why we conducted this study.”
Dr Alissa Ferry, co-author and lecturer, The University of Manchester
Also joining the research team were four sixth form Nuffield Research Placement summer placement students who assisted with design and data collection.
Source:
Journal Reference:
Ferry, AL, et al. (2024). Bigger vs. smaller: Children’s understanding of size comparison words becomes more accurate with age. Child Development. doi.org/10.1111/cdev.14182.
