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Appreciating language conventions: thirteen-month-old Chinese infants understand that word generalization is shared practice

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 April 2019

Siying LIU  and
Renji SUN
Siying LIU
Affiliation:
East China Normal University, China
Renji SUN*
Affiliation:
East China University of Political Science and Law, China
*
*Corresponding author: East China University of Political Science and Law, Number 555, Longyuan Road, Shanghai, China, 201620; E-mail: 122169903@qq.com.
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Abstract

Language is conventional because word meanings are shared among different people. The present study examined Chinese infants’ understanding of the language convention that different people should generalize words in the same way. Thirteen-month-old Mandarin-speaking Chinese infants repeatedly viewed a speaker providing a novel label for a target object in the presence of a distractor object. Next, the objects changed colour and infants viewed the same speaker and a new speaker providing the label for either the different coloured target or distractor. They were also asked by both speakers to locate the correct referent of the label. Results revealed that infants expected both speakers to generalize the label to objects that belonged to the target category. This is the first evidence demonstrating that Chinese infants perceive word generalization as a form of shared convention.

Keywords

language conventionsword learninggeneralizationinfants
Type
Brief Research Reports
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 46 , Issue 4 , July 2019 , pp. 812 - 823
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2019 

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