Naming in young children: a dumb attentional mechanism?

Previous studies have shown that young children selectively attend to some object properties and ignore others when generalizing a newly learned object name. Moreover, the specific properties children attend to depend on the stimulus and task context. The present study tested an attentional account: that children's feature selection in name generalization is guided by non-strategic attentional processes that are minimally influenced by new conceptual information presented in the task. Four experiments presented 3-year-old children and adults with novel artifacts consisting of distinctive base objects with appended parts. In a Name condition, subjects were asked whether test objects had the same name as the exemplar. In a Similarity condition, subjects made similarity judgments for the same objects. Subjects in two experiments were shown a function for either the base object or the parts. Both adults' naming and similarity judgments were influenced by the functional information. Children's similarity judgments were also influenced by the functions. However, children's naming was immune to influence from information about function. Instead, children's feature selection in naming was shifted only by changes in the relative salience of base objects and parts. The results are consistent with the idea that dumb attentional processes are responsible for young children's smart generalizations of novel words to new instances. Potential mechanisms to explain these findings are discussed.