by Mark Mabry, Research Coordinator and Head Teacher
One of the most familiar faces in the classrooms at Bing Nursery School is not that of a child, teacher or parent, but that of one of the researchers from the Stanford Department of Psychology, Vikram Jaswal. Vikram has been a fixture at Bing for the last few years as a “game room person.” While he most often can be found in the classrooms reading a book to children, passing a plate of apples at a snack table, or helping tidy the block area, he has found the time to invite over 270 Bing children toparticipate in his research study—i.e., his game. With Professor Ellen Markman as his advisor, he has been interacting with the children here in order to better understand how they acquire and categorize language.
Vikram grew up in Lincoln, Nebraska, the son of two professors: his father is a physicist and his mother teaches in theater arts. The youngest of four children, he received his B.A. in psychology from Columbia University, where he studied serial learning in pigeons. After graduation, he received a Marshall scholarship and spent two years studying at the University of Edinburgh. There he earned a master’s degree in neuroscience and studied memory following pediatric brain injury. He came to Stanford in 1997 and is a third-year Ph.D. candidate working with Professor Markman.
The studies that Vikram is currently working on at Bing seek to discover how young children are able to add new words to their vocabulary by ascertaining their meaning through indirect exposure to language rather than by formal instruction or feedback. Children use both linguistic and nonlinguistic clues to form a hypothesis about a novel word’s meaning—a process called fast mapping. Though this initial mapping may not fully represent the function of a word, young children seem to be able to infer the distinction between proper and common names. They usually generalize object labels to other like objects, whereas they tend to restrict proper names to their original referents if those referents are animate. Thus children display sensitivity to both syntactic clues (e.g., presence or absence of an article) and semantic clues (e.g., proper names likely refer to animate objects).
The games that Vikram has been playing with so many children at Bing were designed to answer these questions:
1. Animacy. Do young children spontaneously infer that a proper name refers to an animate object?
2. Generalization. Do they restrict the use of an indirectly learned proper name to the original referent, or do they generalize to other objects?
3. Functional strength. Is their ability to generalize a newly learned label to other objects stronger with indirect learning or direct instruction?
In these games Vikram will introduce two novel toys to a child, one with animate properties and one without these properties (inanimate). In the first game (indirect learning) Vikram will simply ask a child to choose between two newly introduced animate and inanimate toys by referring to the new toy with a novel common or proper label [“a dax” for a common name, “Dax” for a proper name]. The child is then asked to pick among a set of the original object and two others (one of similar and one of dissimilar animacy) for an object using this novel name. (See illustration 1.) What the results of this game have been showing is that children show no preference between an animate and inanimate object when referred to with a common name (a dax), but clearly favor the animate toy when referred to as Dax, the proper name form. In addition, when generalizing the new name among a group of objects, children showed no preference between two objects of like animacy when using the common name form, but showed a distinct preference for the original object over one of similar animacy when using the proper name form.
A second game (direct learning) is played where Vikram does not ask the child to select an object using a dax or Dax, but rather points to an animate object and tells the child specifically “This is a dax” or “This is Dax.” In this game, children were much more likely to use the new name only for the original toy rather than generalizing it to another one like it when Vikram had told them its label using the proper name form. When taking the results of the two games together, Vikram is finding that children are able to infer the use of a proper or common name using only the syntactic clue of the absence or presence of an article.
In addition, Vikram says, “While we began the project focusing specifically on the proper/common distinction, our focus now is really on the relationship between direct and indirect learning (when I train them on a label versus when they make an inference about what the label might mean). One might expect that children who are trained on a label will be more confident, remember better, etc. than children who learn the label inferentially. However, we continue to find that children at these ages are as good at learning words inferentially as directly, and that these results hold up in the face of delays of up to 9 days!”
When asked if he had any insight to what the children he has talked with thought of these games they had played, Vikram responded, “Well, one boy gladly went to the game room with me and had a good time. Back in the classroom afterwards, he must have forgotten my (rather difficult) name, as he asked me, ‘Is your name Dax?’”
Vikram’s study has recently been accepted for publication by the journal Child Development.