In the forced-choice match-to-sample paradigm, children are told to extend the name of an object (the standard) to one of two or more other objects. This so-called shape bias has been found to be particularly strong when category relation and shape similarity are separated, and pitted against each other, as in the forced-choice match-to-sample paradigm used by a number of developmental studies with English-speaking children (e.g., Baldwin, 1992 Imai et al., 1994 Golinkoff et al., 1995) as well as Chinese- and German-speaking children (e.g., Imai et al., 2010). Preschool-aged children tend to generalize novel nouns for objects on the basis of perceptual similarity rather than (non-obvious) categorical relations (e.g., Clark, 1973 Bowerman, 1978 Gentner, 1978 Landau et al., 1988). This provides an ecologically plausible processing account with respect to which information is selected and how this information is integrated to act as a guideline for decision-making when novel words have to be generalized. We conclude by suggesting that preschoolers’ noun extensions can be conceptualized within the framework of heuristic decision-making. These findings support our assumption that preschoolers’ decision about word extension change in accordance with the availability of information (from task context or by memory retrieval). ![]() Finally, we revealed that this shape-to-category shift is specific to the word learning context as we did not find it in a non-lexical classification task. Here, they switched to a category-based strategy, thus, predominantly selecting same-category items. Second, we supported preschoolers’ retrieval of item-related information from memory by asking them simple questions about each item prior to the label extension task. In this case, as expected, preschoolers predominantly selected same-shape items. ![]() First, we paralleled the standard extension task commonly used by previous research. To this end, we tested preschoolers on two versions of a novel-noun label extension task. Taking into account research on children’s word learning, categorization, and inductive inference we assume that preschoolers have both a shape-based and a category-based word extension strategy available and can switch between these two depending on which information is easily available. We examined the puzzling research findings that when extending novel nouns, preschoolers rely on shape similarity (rather than categorical relations) while in other task contexts (e.g., property induction) they rely on categorical relations.
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