title: Learning the language of time: Children's acquisition of duration words.
abstract: Children use time words like minute and hour early in development, but take years to acquire their precise meanings. Here we investigate whether children assign meaning to these early usages, and if so, how. To do this, we test their interpretation of seven time words: second, minute, hour, day, week, month, and year. We find that preschoolers infer the orderings of time words (e.g., hour>minute), but have little to no knowledge of the absolute durations they encode. Knowledge of absolute duration is learned much later in development - many years after children first start using time words in speech - and in many children does not emerge until they have acquired formal definitions for the words. We conclude that associating words with the perception of duration does not come naturally to children, and that early intuitive meanings of time words are instead rooted in relative orderings, which children may infer from their use in speech.
authors: University of California, San Diego, United States. Electronic address: katillman@ucsd.edu.
authors: Katharine A
authors: KA
authors: Tillman
authors: University of California, San Diego, United States.
authors: David
authors: D
authors: Barner
mesh_terms: D002648:Child; D002663:Child Language; D002675:Child, Preschool; D006801:Humans; D019359:Knowledge; D007802:Language; D013060:Speech; D013998:Time Perception; D014706:Verbal Learning
keywords: Abstract words; Duration estimation; Time; Time concept development; Time words; Word learning