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Experiment 4: Linguistic Associations

In Experiment 1, and we believe in the labeling tasks faced by young children in world, noun and adjective categories differ in their volume, compactness, and in their association with with specific linguistic contexts. In this fourth experiment, we ask how the association between lexical dimensions in the input and the specific adjectives that comprise the output contribute to the noun advantage. We do this by creating two classes of words whose extensions did not differ in volume nor shape. Each category was organized principally by variation along one input dimension. Four adjective-like categories were defined by associating all categories organized by one input dimension (e.g., color or size) with the same linguistic context unit. Thus there were four adjective categories associated with four linguistic inputs specifying the relevant object dimension. The ``noun'' categories were defined by taking the very same categories (each organized by one input dimension) and associating them with a single linguistic context input. Thus we ask whether it helps or hurts in learning the very same categories to have linguistic inputs specifying subsets of outputs or to have no linguistic inputs that specify subclasses of outputs. Because the linguistic context inputs in the first case also specify the relevant dimension, we call them ``lexical dimensions.''





Michael Gasser
Fri Dec 6 13:15:34 EST 1996