Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Young children’s intuitions about the meanings of novel nouns have revealed foundational biases in language learning. Nevertheless, existing work on such word-learning biases has focused primarily on only one spatial domain to which nouns might refer—objects—not the large-scale and navigable places in which objects are situated. Previous research has nevertheless shown that adults and children treat objects and places differently not only in recognition and navigation tasks, but also in symbolic tasks, like drawing production. In a noun-extension task, we thus evaluate young children’s and adults’ word-learning biases across these two spatial domains—objects and places—and show that young children and adults treat objects and places differently in language: Young children and adults preferentially extend novel nouns to objects over places. This bias suggests a specific role for spatial domain in word learning and may reflect greater attention to objects over places in symbolic contexts like language.