Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Previous work showed that after 9 weekly visits to the lab in which 17- month-old children repeatedly played with andheard names for objects alike in shape, children generalized novel nouns by shape and showed a dramatic increase inacquisition of new object names outside of the laboratory. The present attempts to influence childrens vocabularies bygiving them themed boxes of toys and books about vehicles (organized by shape) or foods (organized by material andshape). The question is, will minimally altering childrens home environments change their vocabulary composition andword learning biases? Results show that typically developing children showed the predicted shifts in their vocabularycomposition – children in the food enrichment knew more food words than children in the vehicle enrichment, and viceversa but no change in word learning biases. In contrast, late-talkers showed increased shape bias in both conditions, butmore so in the vehicle condition.