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The shape-bias in Spanish-speaking children and its relationship to vocabulary*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 August 2011

ERIN R. HAHN  and
LISA CANTRELL
ERIN R. HAHN*
Affiliation:
Furman University
LISA CANTRELL
Affiliation:
Indiana University, Bloomington
*
Address for correspondence: Department of Psychology, Furman University, 3300 Poinsett Hwy., Greenville, SC 29613. tel: 864 294-3210; fax: 864 294-2206; e-mail: erin.hahn@furman.edu
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Abstract

Considerable research has demonstrated that English-speaking children extend nouns on the basis of shape. Here we asked whether the development of this bias is influenced by the structure of a child's primary language. We tested English- and Spanish-speaking children between the ages of 1 ; 10 and 3 ; 4 in a novel noun generalization task. Results showed that English learners demonstrated a robust shape-bias, whereas Spanish learners did not. Further, English-speaking children produced more shape-based nouns outside the laboratory than Spanish-speaking children, despite similar productive vocabulary sizes. We interpret the results as evidence that attentional biases arise from the specifics of the language environment.

Type
Brief Research Reports
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 39 , Issue 2 , March 2012 , pp. 443 - 455
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2011

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Footnotes

[*]

This work was supported by a Research and Professional Growth grant from Furman University as well as funds from the university's Undergraduate Research and Internship office and the Psychology Department. We gratefully acknowledge the parents and children who participated, the schools that assisted with recruitment and two anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful feedback on an earlier version of this manuscript. Portions of these data were presented at the biennial meeting of the Cognitive Development Society in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

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