Are There Specific Word Learning Constraints In Southern Mandarin Children?

Different researchers put forward different theoretical explanations about child word acquisition of L1. Some researchers think that children are influenced by certain constraints to acquire the words of L1 selectively and orderly (Markman 1989, 1990). The paper mainly discusses four word learning constraints: (1) the whole object assumption; (2) the taxonomic assumption; (3) the mutual exclusivity assumption; (4) the shape bias.The current research sampled Southern Mandarin children aged from 2 to 4 years. It mainly studied whether the word learning constraints would influence child word acquisition of L1 and discussed whether age and gender would influence word acquisition in applying these constraints. Four different experiments were conducted. In Experiment 1, we focused on the whole object assumption across children's word learning. The whole object assumption leads children to infer that terms refer to objects as a whole rather than to their parts, substance, colour, or other properties.We found that for all three age groups, there were significantly more whole object responses made in the Unfamiliar Condition as compared to the Familiar Condition. There were no significant effects of the age or the gender of the children on the increase number of whole object responses in the Familiar and Unfamiliar conditions. In Experiment 2, we explored the taxonomic assumption, which states that"labels refer to the objects of the same kind rather than to objects that are thematically related".The result of experiment demonstrated that children would show more taxonomic preference than thematic preference. Moreover, two-year-old children showed a higher thematic preference, while three-year-olds and four-year-olds showed a higher taxonomic preference. Therefore, there were significant changes with age in the number of taxonomic responses but no gender effects on the selection results. The mutual exclusivity assumption says that there is only one name for each object. The purpose of Experiment 3 was to investigate whether Southern Mandarin children would honor the mutual exclusivity assumption and whether the children's responses of different age and gender would be different giving the different naming conditions (real nouns and pseudo nouns). We found these children tended to use mutual exclusivity assumption with the increase of age, while gender didn't make any significant difference. What is more, the study also showed that children could grasp the real naming of the familiar objects efficiently. Compared with the pseudo naming of unfamiliar objects, children relied more on the mutual exclusivity assumption in the real naming of unfamiliar objects. In Experiment 4, we examined the shape bias on the effects of children's word learning. The shape bias states that children tend to extend objects names based on the same shape, not to those of the same size, color, or texture. It suggested that children show a higher shape bias in the Novel Label Condition than in the No Label Condition. The result also indicated that the older children performed better shape choices than the younger children. However, boys and girls did not show significant differences of the responses.These results showed that 2 to 4-year-old Southern Mandarin children would adopt these four word learning constraints to interpret the meanings of new words. Different ages of children would perform differently, but there was no significant difference in gender. Furthermore, it also explored how the word learning constraints would facilitate children's language development.However, the word learning constraints are not so effective that they couldn't help children interpret all categories of words, but almost focused on nouns. Therefore, we can not separate the effects of constraints from a wide range of linguistic, cognitive and other influences on children's inferences about novel word meanings. These factors serve as another starting point for the theory of word learning.