Conventionality and children's word learning

Word meanings are arbitrary because the relation between a word and its referent is not transparent. Nonetheless, the meanings of words are treated as objective facts about the world. This is because of conventionality - the members of a given linguistic community agree upon the link between a word and its meaning (Clark, 1993). This dissertation examines how an appreciation of conventionality affects preschoolers' word learning. The first study was an observational study that investigated parents' labeling strategies when providing new object labels that were and were not likely to be shared by the members of the larger linguistic community during conversations with their preschoolers. The findings revealed that when their labels were likely to be shared, parents did not provide additional information relevant to conventionality. In contrast, when their labels were unlikely to be shared, parents modified their typical labeling routines in a number of ways. For example, parents provided labels in the form of a simile and avoided using labels casually throughout the conversation. Parents also supplied additional information about an object's origins when their labels were unlikely to be shared. Lastly, parents of older children were more likely to state their ignorance when their labels were unlikely to be shared than were parents of younger children. The second and third studies investigated whether preschoolers learned words from others' linguistic communities as well as they did words from their own. Preschoolers were taught the name of an unfamiliar toy that they were told was from "Japan" or "downtown". In both studies, 4-year-olds were unlikely to learn the name of an object when told that the object was from Japan, but performed well when told that it was from downtown. Three-year-olds performed poorly overall. These findings suggest that 4-year-olds do not learn words from others' linguistic communities as well as they do words from their own. Taken together the findings show that: (1) parents provide additional information to children when new words are unlikely to be shared by the child's linguistic community, and (2) preschoolers are sensitive to some of that information and modify their word learning accordingly.