The interaction between taxonomic assumption and syntactic category: Data from Mandarin Chinese-speaking children

The purpose of this investigation was to examine a particular type of word learning constraint referred to as the Taxonomic Assumption. According to the Taxonomic Assumption hypothesis, children will expect that a novel word refers to objects of the same category rather than objects that are thematically related to the referent. This project investigated whether 3- and 4-year-old Mandarin Chinese-speaking children: (a) evidence taxonomic assumption when interpreting the meanings of novel words; (b) make distinctions between novel nouns and novel adjectives with respect to taxonomic assumption; and (c) primarily attend to taxonomic relations at the subordinate level category when presented with novel nouns and novel adjectives.;Three experiments were conducted to assess these questions. Thirty 3-year-olds (M = 3;3) and 30 4-year-olds (M = 4;9) participated in Experiment 1. These same children also participated in Experiment 2. Another 30 3-year-olds (M = 3;3), and 30 4-year-olds (M = 4;8) participated in Experiment 3.;The results did not provide clear support for the Taxonomic Assumption proposal. Statistical analyses based on the proportion of children's selections of taxonomically related items showed that providing novel words caused children to choose the taxonomically related items significantly more often than when no words were provided. However, the frequency distributions of the number of children evidencing consistent response patterns across all experimental conditions did not clearly establish that there was a linguistic effect guiding children's attention to taxonomic relations among objects. Moreover, the results did not show that children made a distinction between the syntactic categories of noun and adjective. Finally, the prediction about linguistic-specific effects on Mandarin Chinese-speaking children's interpretation of novel nouns and novel adjectives at the subordinate category was not supported. Introducing a novel noun or a novel adjective did not result in any significant differences in the Mandarin Chinese-speaking children's taxonomic responses. It is suggested that children's response patterns could be influenced by multiple forces, including perceptual salience of the referents, translation effects, children's current linguistic level and world knowledge, and the context of the trial.