Why is a pomegranate an apple? The role of shape, taxonomic relatedness, and prior lexical knowledge in children's overextensions of apple and dog

Abstract

Children's overextensions (e.g. referring to a pomegranate as apple) raise intriguing questions regarding early word meanings. Specifically, how do object shape, taxonomic relatedness, and prior lexical knowledge influence children's overextensions? The present study sheds new light on this issue by presenting items that disentangle the three factors of shape, taxonomic category, and prior lexical knowledge, and by using a novel comprehension task (the screened-alternative task) in which children can indicate negative exemplars (e.g. which items are notapples). 49 subjects in three age groups participated (Ms=2;0, 2;6, and 4;5). Findings indicate: (1) Error patterns differed by task. In production, errors were overwhelmingly due to selecting items that matched the target word in both shape and taxonomic relatedness. In comprehension, more errors were based on either shape alone or taxonomic relatedness alone, and the nature and frequency of the overextensions interacted with prior lexical knowledge. (2) Error patterns also differed markedly based on the word being tested (apple vs. dog), in both comprehension and production. (3) As predicted, errors were more frequent in production than comprehension, though only for children in the two younger age groups. Altogether, the study indicates that overextensions are not simply production errors, and that both taxonomic relatedness and object shape play a powerful role in early naming errors.