In English, many words can be used flexibly to label artifacts,
as nouns, or functional uses of those artifacts, as verbs:
We can shovel snow with a shovel and comb our hair with a
comb. Here, we examine whether young children form generalizations
about flexibility from early in life and use such
generalizations to predict new word meanings. When children
learn a new word for an artifact, do they also expect it
to label its functional use, and vice versa? In Experiment 1,
we show that when four- and five-year-olds are taught a first
novel word to label a familiar action—e.g., that bucking means
shoveling—they exclude the artifact involved in this action—
i.e., the shovel—as the meaning of a second novel word (e.g.,
gork). This suggests that children spontaneously expected the
first novel word—which referred to the action—to also refer to
the artifact. In Experiment 2, we show that this pattern extends
to words that label novel actions involving novel artifacts, suggesting
that children expect any word for an action to label the
artifact that helps carry out that action. Experiment 3 traces
how such generalizations may arise in development. In particular,
we show that while four- and five-year-olds each expect
words to label artifacts and their functional uses, three-yearolds
may not.