title: The shape-bias in Spanish-speaking children and its relationship to vocabulary.
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.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, Furman University, 3300 Poinsett Hwy., Greenville, SC 29613, USA. erin.hahn@furman.edu
authors.forename: Erin R
authors.initials: ER
authors.lastname: Hahn
authors.forename: Lisa
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Cantrell
mesh_terms: D002663:Child Language; D002675:Child, Preschool; D005556:Form Perception; D005793:Generalization, Psychological; D006801:Humans; D007223:Infant; D013030:Spain; D014825:Vocabulary