Coloring Outside the Lines:Error Patterns in Children’s Acquisition of Color Terms
Abstract
A key challenge for children in language acquisition is to learnthe mapping of words to mental categories, since this mappingvaries greatly from language to language. The errors childrenmake in this process are very informative regarding the devel-opment of lexical semantic categories; in particular, how chil-dren overextend a word to an inappropriate exemplar providesa window onto the mechanisms that underlie their categoriza-tion processes. We perform a large-scale quantitative analysisof the detailed patterns of children’s errors in the domain ofcolor, finding evidence that these error patterns are driven byan interaction between domain general principles of catego-rization, and children’s developing knowledge of the seman-tics of color. Our results suggest that, while domain generalprocesses play a role throughout development, their influencevaries across ages according to their use of domain specific(conceptual) knowledge, which gradually increases over time.