By admin 
A unique study has shed fascinating new light on the way young children begin to understand the meaning of words.
The findings by researchers from the University of Manchester have been published in the journal Child Development.
Children start saying words around their first birthday, and for a while they say only one word at a time, although they quickly build their vocabulary by their second year.
But the researchers discovered that they don’t do this by adding a complete form of new words to their own personal dictionary.
Instead, they place a new word in their dictionary that has part of the meaning, but not all of it, and slowly adapt it as they hear more language.
To show how children do this, the researchers set up a study at the Manchester Museum, working with a group of three to eight year olds.
A researcher built four blocks on top of each other, or four blocks flat on a table, and then the children were asked to respond to words of different sizes by building a larger, smaller or larger version.
The researchers compared how their structure differed from the researcher’s in each dimension, using mathematical models to describe the types of changes children made, and how patterns varied with age.
Three- and four-year-olds tended to treat bigger, smaller, and taller with the same meaning: they built things that were bigger in all directions.
“It seems that when children first learn words they get a general idea of what they mean – in this case the words mean a change in size,” said co-author Dr Alissa Ferry, lecturer at the University of Manchester .
“This seems to be the way children call a cow a dog, or fruit apples, even though they’ve never heard it from an adult. But with more experience they refine their word meanings.
“We think all children go through this process of refining word meanings, but which words are refined and when depends on what they hear around them.”
“Size words,” explains co-author Dr. Katherine Twomey, also from the University of Manchester, “are harder to learn because they describe relationships between all kinds of different types of objects, making it harder to find what is in common.
“That makes it easier for us to see how the meaning changes with age.”
Around age 5, children generally figured out that smaller meant using fewer blocks.
But it wasn’t until around age seven that they reliably learned that bigger really does mean bigger, but specifically in the “upward” direction.
Most three-year-olds built bigger things when the researchers asked for smaller ones, although some of them seemed to do it faster than others.
It wasn’t until around age seven that most children knew that bigger specifically meant “up.”
However, some 3- and 4-year-olds already seemed to know that bigger meant “up,” probably because they encountered these words more often in conversations with their caregivers.
Learning a language is a unique human experience; kids just pick it up by being exposed to it. But we don’t yet fully know why that happens, which is why we conducted this research.”
Dr. Alissa Ferry, co-author and lecturer, The University of Manchester
Also on the research team were four sixth form Nuffield Research Placement summer placement students who helped design and collect the data.
Source:
Magazine reference:
Ferry, AL, et al. (2024). Bigger versus smaller: Children’s understanding of comparison words becomes more accurate as they grow older. Child development. doi.org/10.1111/cdev.14182.