Relationship between adults' actions and young children's inferences about word meanings

This study examined whether 1-year-olds and 6-year-olds attend to the relevant properties (shape or material) of solid objects in making inferences when adults demonstrate appropriate actions. In an experiment, the experimenter presented thirty-six Japanese 4-year-olds and thirty-three Japanese 6-year-olds a nonsense label with an unfamiliar standard solid object and performed an action on the object that emphasized the shape (e.g., rolling) or the material (e.g., squeezing) of these standards. The experimenter then asked these children, given the same label, to choose an object that matched the standard in shape or in material, and the reasons for their choices. The results showed that the children of both age groups used action information to make inferences about the nonsense labels. Six-year-olds were found to be more adept than 4-year-olds in attention to action-relevant object properties. The importance of adults' input and the role of actions in the acquisition of word meanings were discussed.