Acquiring color names via linguistic contrast: the influence of contrasting terms.
Linguistic contrast of the form "It's not X; it's Y" is often used by adults to correct children's naming errors. The present studies examined whether such linguistic contrast could help preschoolers learn a novel color name. In Experiment 1, a novel color term was contrasted only once with 1 or 2 familiar color names. Contrasting a new color term with children's own label for the stimulus color helped 5-year-olds learn the new term, but contrasting the new term with randomly chosen familiar color terms did not. For 4-year-olds, neither kind of contrast helped much. Experiments 2 and 3 showed that when the contrastive information was presented more than once, even 3- and 4-year-olds performed much like the 5-year-olds in Experiment 1. Together, these findings suggest that contrasting a new term with a child's own term facilitates the acquisition of the new term, perhaps because it gives the child specific information about how two terms are related in meaning.
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Department of Psychology, Brown University, Providence, RI 02912.
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D001288:Attention; D002675:Child, Preschool; D003118:Color Perception; D003210:Concept Formation; D006801:Humans; D007804:Language Development; D011939:Mental Recall; D011578:Psycholinguistics; D014706:Verbal Learning