Perception, object kind, and object naming

• Authors: Barbara Landau;Michael Leyton
• Venue: Spatial Cognition and Computation
• Year: 1998

We investigated whether certain perceptualproperties of objects could support children‘s andadults‘ judgments of the range of shape changespermissible for a named object. Three year-olds andadults saw a line drawing of a novel object andheard it named using a count noun (e.g., ’’This is adax.‘‘). Then they judged whether shape orsize changes of the original could also be called bythe same name (i.e., ’’Is this a dax?‘‘). Children and adults extended the object name to thesize changes. In contrast, extension to shapechanges strongly depended on the particularcharacteristics of the objects. Objects withstraight edges and sharp corners elicited very lowgeneralization to shape changes, consistent with a’’shape bias‘‘. Objects with curved edges, curved andwrinkled edges, and curved and wrinkled edges plus’’eyes‘‘ elicited increasingly broad generalization tothe same shape changes. In a comparable No-Wordtask, children‘s and adults‘ judgments were similaracross all different object types. The difference ingeneralization patterns over the two tasks suggeststhat only naming systematically engagedrepresentations of the objects that could supportinferences about their potential for shape change. The results are discussed in terms of the complexinteractions of perception, ontology, and labellingin the development of object naming.