%0 Journal Article
%A Childers, Jane B.
%A Tomasello, Michael
%+ Department of Developmental and Comparative Psychology, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Max Planck Society
%T Children extend both words and non-verbal actions to novel exemplars : 
%G eng
%U https://hdl.handle.net/11858/00-001M-0000-0010-069B-E
%F EDOC: 117379
%R 10.1111/1467-7687.00270
%7 2003-03-12
%D 2003
%* Review method: peer-reviewed
%X Markson and Bloom (1997) found that some learning processes involved in children's acquisition of a new word are also involved in their acquisition of a new fact. They argued that these findings provided evidence against a domain-specific system for word learning. However, Waxman and Booth (2000) found that whereas children quite readily extend newly learned words to novel exemplars within a category, they do not do this with newly learned facts. They therefore argued that because children did not extend some facts in a principled way, word learning and fact learning may result from different domain-specific processes. In the current study, we argue that facts are a poor comparison in this argument since facts vary in whether they are tied to particular individuals. A more appropriate comparison is a conventional non-verbal action on an object –‘what we do with things like this’– since they are routinely generalized categorically to new objects. Our study shows that 21/2-year-old children extend novel non-verbal actions to new objects in the same way that they extend novel words to new objects. The findings provide support for the view that word learning represents a unique configuration of more general learning processes.
%J Developmental Science
%V 6
%N 2
%& 185
%P 185 - 190