Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

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.