Developmental Psychology
2002, Vol. 38, No. 6, 993–1003
Copyright 2002 by the American Psychological Association, Inc.
0012-1649/02/$5.00 DOI: 10.1037//0012-1649.38.6.993
Children Use Whole–Part Juxtaposition as a Pragmatic Cue
to Word Meaning
Megan M. Saylor
Mark A. Sabbagh
University of Oregon
Queen’s University at Kingston
Dare A. Baldwin
University of Oregon
When parents label novel parts of familiar objects, they typically provide familiar whole-object terms
before offering novel part terms (e.g., “See this cup? This is the rim.”). Such whole–part juxtaposition
might help children to accurately interpret the meaning of novel part terms, but it can do so only if they
recognize the conjunction as a potential cue to part meaning. Two studies examined (a) whether 3- to
4-year-olds use whole–part juxtaposition to accurately interpret novel part terms and (b) how they might
do so. Study 1 confirmed that children indeed use juxtaposition to guide learning of novel part terms.
Furthermore, 2 control conditions clarified that children’s use of juxtaposition was not simply due
to memory effects, such as the facilitation of lexical access, nor to recognition of the grammatical frame
that typically accompanies juxtaposition. Study 2 revealed that children readily use juxtaposition in a
novel, gestural format. Such flexibility in recognizing and utilizing novel variants of juxtaposition
strongly suggests that pragmatic understanding lies at the heart of children’s sensitivity to whole–part
juxtaposition.
ences to novel parts with references to familiar whole objects
(Masur, 1997; Ninio, 1980; Ninio & Bruner, 1978; Shipley, Kuhn,
& Madden, 1983). For example, a parent in Masur’s study presenting a novel part term to her child said, “That’s a bird . . . bird
with a big beak” (p. 433). Juxtaposing novel part terms with
familiar whole-object labels in this way provides a possible cue to
children that reference to something other than the whole object is
intended, and parts may represent a salient alternative candidate
meaning. But do young children recognize the significance of this
cue for guiding their hypotheses about word meanings? If children
can capitalize in this way on the juxtaposition that parents offer,
language learning would be greatly expedited.
Children’s ability to draw on juxtaposition when faced with
novel part terms has been hinted at in previous research investigating the role of semantic constraints in early word learning. In
particular, research concerning the mutual exclusivity assumption
has provided preliminary evidence that children are sensitive to
whole–part juxtaposition as a cue to part-term meaning. Mutual
exclusivity, a default assumption children may bring to wordlearning situations, enables them to avoid attaching more than one
label to a given object (e.g., Golinkoff, Mervis, & Hirsh-Pasek,
1994; Markman, 1992, 1994; Markman & Wachtel, 1988). This
bias could facilitate part-term learning by guiding children to
search for an alternative to the whole object for a novel label’s
referent when such a label (e.g., thorax) is offered in connection
with a familiar object (e.g., butterfly). Along these lines, part
interpretations represent one salient alternative (e.g., Markman &
Wachtel, 1988; Merriman & Bowman, 1989; see also Clark, 1987,
1993; Mervis & Bertrand, 1994; Mervis, Golinkoff, & Bertrand,
1994).
Novel words referring to parts of objects, such as thorax and
handle, pose potential difficulties for learners that are characteristic of word learning more generally. In particular, when children
hear novel part terms, they face the challenge of determining that
parts of objects are meant from among the logically infinite possibilities (e.g., Quine, 1960). Fortunately, parents typically offer
cues in their speech that could help children resolve these inductive complexities. Specifically, parents tend to juxtapose refer-
Megan M. Saylor and Dare A. Baldwin, Department of Psychology,
University of Oregon; Mark A. Sabbagh, Department of Psychology,
Queen’s University at Kingston.
Portions of these data were presented at the October 1998 Interdisciplinary Conference on Intentionality, Eugene, Oregon; the October 1998
Boston University Conference on Language Development, Boston; and the
April 1999 meeting of the Society for Research in Child Development,
Albuquerque, New Mexico. This study was supported in part by a grant
from the John Merck Scholars Fund, by National Science Foundation
(NSF) New Young Investigator Award 9458339 to Dare A. Baldwin and
by an NSF graduate fellowship to Mark A. Sabbagh. The article was
prepared while Dare A. Baldwin was a fellow at the Center for Advanced
Study in the Behavioral Sciences; we thank the William T. Grant Foundation for financial support underlying this fellowship. We give special
thanks to Raisa Alam, Allison Archer, Dawn Delgado, Katie Gallerani,
Brooke Hughes, Margot Holdstein, Christopher Pagnani, and Joseph Penrod for help with coding and data preparation, and to Jodie A. Baird and
Kate Harkness for helpful comments on a draft.
Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Megan
M. Saylor, who is now at Department of Psychology and Human Development, Vanderbilt University, GPC, Box 512, Nashville, Tennessee
37203. E-mail: m.saylor@vanderbilt.edu
993
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SAYLOR, SABBAGH, AND BALDWIN
One way to demonstrate children’s adherence to mutual exclusivity for interpreting new words is to compare their inferences
about word meaning when a novel label is applied to a known
object versus a novel object. If mutual exclusivity is operative,
then children should be more likely to interpret the novel label as
referring to a part (rather than the whole object) when the novel
label is applied to a known object relative to a novel object.
Markman and Wachtel (1988) tested this hypothesis with 3- and
4-year-olds in an elegant series of studies. Interestingly, in addition
to addressing their intended hypothesis, their research may have
also inadvertently supplied a first test of the role that juxtaposition
between familiar and novel terms plays in part-term acquisition.
To illustrate this requires describing their methodology in some
detail.
In one test of mutual exclusivity, Markman and Wachtel (1988,
Study 3) used the same picture (e.g., a lung) as both a novel and
familiar object for different groups of children: One group of
children heard lung (as the name for the whole object) without any
previous experience with the object, but the other group was taught
lung prior to introducing them to a novel part term (e.g., trachea).
During the comprehension procedure children were asked to identify the novel part of the object (e.g., “What’s a trachea?”). To
ensure that the newly trained lung indeed functioned as a familiar
label for children in the familiar-object condition, the researcher
reminded children of the label (e.g., “Remember this lung?”)
directly before asking the test question (e.g., “What’s a trachea?”).
In line with the predictions of the mutual exclusivity assumption,
children were more likely to respond with the appropriate part of
the object if the lung had been previously labeled, and was therefore familiar, than if they had not been taught the label, and lung
was therefore unfamiliar.
Although the reminder of the newly trained whole-object term
(e.g., “Remember this lung?”) in Study 3 was introduced to equate
the familiarity of the whole-object labels used in the novel and
familiar conditions, it may also have provided a crucial bit of
information to children in the form of whole–part juxtaposition.
The phrase children heard in the familiar-object condition (e.g.,
“Remember this lung? What’s the trachea?”) was similar to parents’ juxtaposition of familiar and novel labels when they introduce novel part terms to children (Masur, 1997). Thus, children’s
part responses in Markman and Wachtel’s (1988) Study 3 may
have been guided, in part, by their sensitivity to such juxtaposition.
In another study examining the role of mutual exclusivity, Markman and Wachtel (1988, Study 2) did not provide children with
immediate juxtaposition of whole-object terms and novel part
terms (e.g., “What’s a boom?”). Instead, children heard familiar
whole-object labels some time prior to seeing the object being
asked about and hearing the novel part terms. Under these conditions the juxtaposition cue would have been considerably weakened. Although children did show some evidence of using mutual
exclusivity in Study 2, their selection of parts in response to novel
labels applied to familiar objects was substantially lower than
when the whole-object term immediately preceded the novel label
in Study 3 (57% vs. 85%, respectively). Furthermore, children’s
part responding in Study 2 did not exceed chance levels, suggesting that the juxtaposition information offered in Study 3 may have
facilitated children’s part interpretations of novel words.
From the present perspective, the pattern of data across the two
Markman and Wachtel (1988) studies suggests that children may
benefit from clear juxtaposition when faced with learning novel
part terms. Unfortunately, Markman and Wachtel’s findings are
not conducive to a direct comparison between Studies 2 and 3,
because their goals for the research did not necessitate that they
use the same objects in the familiar-object conditions across the
two studies. This speaks to the need for research specifically
designed to investigate children’s ability to capitalize on whole–
part juxtaposition. The present studies directly targeted this issue.
It is important to recognize that the current research did not
attempt to pit children’s use of whole–part juxtaposition against
their use of other resources for part-term learning, such as mutual
exclusivity, or other general cognitive skills, such as covariation
tracking or sensitivity to salience. Rather, the studies reported here
investigated whether juxtaposition informs children’s judgments
about a novel part term over and above the assistance that might be
supplied by general cognitive skills and mutual exclusivity alone.
Study 1
The primary goal of Study 1 was to test children’s reliance on
whole–part juxtaposition in part-term learning. We did so by
comparing children’s level of part-term learning across two conditions: The juxtaposition condition, which included whole–part
juxtaposition, and the no-juxtaposition condition, in which juxtaposition was absent.
Study 1 also examined two mechanisms that might underlie
children’s sensitivity to juxtaposition. Recall that juxtaposition in
the context of introducing a new part term involves a known whole
object label that is juxtaposed with a novel term (e.g., “That’s a
bird . . . bird with a big beak.”). One possibility is that juxtaposition simply enhances children’s retrieval of the name for the whole
object, which in turn more effectively triggers the operation of the
mutual exclusivity assumption, hence increasing part hypotheses
for new labels. If this retrieval facilitation is the sole mechanism
driving children’s use of juxtaposition, then aids to lexical access
that do not involve juxtaposition—such as simply introducing a
delay to provide more time for lexical access—should likewise
facilitate part-term learning. The delay control condition tested this
possibility.
An alternative possibility is that children use structural information that is correlated with whole–part juxtaposition (e.g., Gleitman, 1990; Naigles & Hoff-Ginsberg, 1995) to infer a part meaning for the novel term. Parents typically produce novel part terms
in the following general frame: “Look, a [known whole-object
label]. See the/its [novel term]” (e.g., Masur, 1997). Perhaps over
repeated exposure to such juxtaposition children come to link the
associated grammatical frame with part meanings. If so, children
might take the presence of the grammatical frame itself as a
predictor of part meaning. This possibility is plausible given previous work confirming that children reliably use information about
the distribution of novel terms across labeling phrases when drawing inferences about the meaning of new words (Hall, Waxman, &
Hurwitz, 1997; Mintz & Gleitman, 1998; Prasada, 1993; Taylor &
Gelman, 1988). For example, property terms, such as glittery can
appear either as adjectival predicates (e.g., “It’s glittery!”) or as
modifiers on a noun (e.g., “A glittery one”). The relative position
of these terms appears to give children information relevant to the
likely meaning of the new term, namely, that the new term is more
likely to be a label for a property than an object. Likewise, if
WHOLE–PART JUXTAPOSITION AS A PRAGMATIC CUE
children are able to rely on grammatical structure when learning
part terms, then the presence of the frame itself, without the
accompanying whole-object term (and hence without clear-cut
juxtaposition information), should trigger part interpretations. The
frame control condition tested this possibility.
Evaluating children’s knowledge of part-term meanings is a
notoriously difficult enterprise. One cannot simply ask children to
point to a part in response to an inquiry about a novel part term
(e.g., “What’s a thorax?”) because the reference of pointing gestures is ambiguous between parts and whole objects. For instance,
a pointing gesture may refer to the particular part that it comes
closest to contacting, or it may refer to the whole object. Removing
parts of objects from their parent whole objects is also unsatisfactory because it is not clear whether the part continues to be a part
when it is separated from the whole object—it may become
another independent whole object (Tversky & Hemenway, 1984).
To circumvent these problems we chose to use a color identification task as our index of part-term learning. We showed children
objects that were constructed such that the major portion of the
whole object was in one color, and a salient part was in another
(e.g., a red butterfly with a green thorax) and asked children
questions such as “See this butterfly? What color is the thorax?”.
These objects allowed us to probe children’s part-term knowledge
via their color-term production, without having to remove the
salient part. It also allowed for a fairly unambiguous interpretation
of children’s color responses. Of course, this methodology depended on children’s ability to produce color terms. Fortunately,
by 3 years of age, children have an impressive command of color
terms. Typically, they are able to produce and comprehend the
basic color terms (e.g., red, blue, green, yellow) and some others
besides (e.g., purple, beige; Shatz, Behrend, Gelman, & Ebeling,
1996).
Using the color question methodology enabled us to construct
questions across the four conditions that contrasted quite minimally in terms of surface form. Crucially, however, only the
juxtaposition condition involved genuine whole–part juxtaposition. For example, in the juxtaposition condition children were
asked, “See this butterfly? What color is the thorax?” whereas in
the no-juxtaposition condition children were asked “See this?
What color is the thorax?”. The delay control condition (“See this?
[delay] See it? [delay] What color is the thorax?”) and the frame
control condition (“See this thing? What color is the thorax?”)
were variants of the no-juxtaposition and juxtaposition conditions,
respectively. The former controlled for lexical access facilitation
and the latter for grammatical form.
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If genuine sensitivity to whole–part juxtaposition facilitates
children’s part-term learning, they should show enhanced ability to
provide the color of the novel part in response to test questions in
the juxtaposition condition relative to all three of the other
conditions.
Method
Participants
Forty-eight children (28 girls and 20 boys) ranging in age from 3 years 0
months to 4 years 6 months (mean age ⫽ 3 years 9 months) participated.
All children were developing normally and came from predominantly
White, middle-class, monolingual, English-speaking families. Because
color-term production was the dependent measure, a short pretest was
included to assess children’s production of the six color terms used in the
present study (i.e., red, green, blue, yellow, orange, purple). Only children
who could produce all six color terms when asked were included. An
additional 27 children participated but their data were omitted because of
the following: inability to produce all six color terms during the pretest
(n ⫽ 19), experimenter error (n ⫽ 2), parental interference (n ⫽ 1), and
noncompliance (n ⫽ 5).
Materials
The stimuli were 12 pictures of familiar objects, each with a salient part.
The objects were selected on the basis of existing norms regarding children’s early vocabularies, so that all objects had whole-object labels likely
to be in young children’s productive and receptive vocabularies (Fenson et
al., 1994). The pictures were created out of construction paper, and a black
marker was used to highlight contours (e.g., the line between the head and
neck) and defining object features (e.g., the eyes on an animal and the
windows on a house). Half of the objects had a salient novel part (e.g.,
thorax on a butterfly), and half had a salient familiar part (e.g., wheel on
car). Each object was presented so that the largest portion was in one color
and a salient part of the object was in another (see Table 1). The six colors
used were chosen on the basis of previous research indicating that they are
within the productive repertoire of 3- to 4-year-old children (Shatz et al.,
1996). Half of the pictures were of animate creatures and half were of
inanimate objects. Including stimuli of both types enabled us to ascertain
whether any effects would generalize across an ontological distinction that
has been shown to affect children’s inferences about word meaning (e.g.,
Jones & Smith, 1998).
The experimental sessions were videotaped. This enabled later coding of
children’s responses.
Design and Procedure
Pretesting. After a brief warm-up session, children were seated at a
small table facing the experimenter. First, children participated in a differ-
Table 1
Stimuli Used in Study 1
Stimuli
Animacy
Animates
Inanimates
Familiar parts
Novel parts
Orange pig with a purple ear
Green cat with a red tail
Yellow bunny with a blue eye
Purple cup with an orange handle
Red car with a green wheel
Blue house with a yellow door
Purple spider with an orange pedicel
Red butterfly with a green thorax
Blue fish with a yellow dorsal
Orange train with a purple coupler
Green flower with a red stamen
Yellow shoe with a blue instep
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SAYLOR, SABBAGH, AND BALDWIN
ent study with a 10-min long procedure that did not involve any of the same
stimuli or color terms used in the present study. Following this, children
were presented with a pretest in which they were shown color swatches and
asked to identify each of the six colors used on the test objects. The colors
were presented individually in a fixed order. Only the data from children
who could produce all six color terms when asked were included in the
analyses.
Test questions. After pretesting, children were told that they were
going to be asked questions about the colors of some pictures, and they
were asked to respond with just one color to each test question. Children
were then shown each test object individually and either asked about the
color of a whole object or its part in one of four conditions: (a) In the
juxtaposition condition, the whole-object term was presented before the
part term (e.g., “See this butterfly? What color is the thorax?”), in a manner
analogous to parents’ introduction of novel part terms (e.g., Masur, 1997;
Ninio, 1980; Ninio & Bruner, 1978; Shipley et al., 1983). (b) In the
no-juxtaposition condition, the test question was identical to that used in
the juxtaposition condition except that the whole-object term was not
included (e.g., “See this? What color is the thorax?”). (c) In the delay
control condition, the no-juxtaposition condition was augmented by two
types of aids to lexical retrieval in the form of two 3-s long delays and a
reorienting utterance (e.g., “See this? [delay] See it? [delay] What color is
the thorax?”).1 (d) In the frame control condition, children were offered a
labeling phrase identical to that offered in the juxtaposition condition
except that the whole-object label was replaced with the neutral term thing
(e.g., “See this thing? What color is the dorsal?”).
This study was conducted in three phases. During the first phase,
children were randomly assigned to either the juxtaposition (n ⫽ 12, mean
age ⫽ 4 years 0 months) or no-juxtaposition (n ⫽ 12, mean age ⫽ 3
years 11 months) condition, with the constraint that there were roughly
equal numbers of boys and girls in each condition. During the second and
third phases, respectively, two new groups of children participated in the
delay control (n ⫽ 12, mean age ⫽ 3 years 8 months) and frame control
(n ⫽ 12, mean age ⫽ 3 years 7 months) conditions.2
The test pictures were presented in the center of a standard-sized sheet
of white paper in one of six orders. The six orders were determined
randomly with the following constraints: no more than two pictures of one
ontological kind appeared in immediate sequence (e.g., no more than two
consecutive animate pictures), and no more than two whole objects of the
same color appeared in a row (e.g., no more than two consecutive orange
whole objects). Children also received no more than two questions of a
particular type in a row (e.g., no more than two consecutive whole-object
questions).
Children were asked one test question about each object. If children did
not respond to the test question the first time, it was repeated. If they did
not respond the second time, the experimenter skipped to the next item but
returned to the picture at the end of the session. All children who passed the
pretest answered all of the test questions. Children were asked 12 questions
in total. Six of the questions probed knowledge of labels for familiar whole
objects and six probed knowledge of part terms. Three of the part questions
probed knowledge of labels for familiar parts and three probed knowledge
of labels for novel parts.
Familiar item test questions. The familiar whole and familiar part test
questions provided a baseline measure of children’s ability to answer each
of our test questions appropriately. If our queries about colors indexed
knowledge of the relevant labels, then children should offer the color of the
whole object when asked about the whole object and the color of the part
when asked about the part. All children were asked six familiar whole test
questions and three familiar part test questions in a manner that matched
the modeling of the novel part labels in the experimental condition in
which they participated. For example, children in the juxtaposition condition heard both the whole and part labels when being asked about familiar
parts and wholes (e.g., “See this pig? What color is the ear/pig?”), and
children in the frame control condition were asked about the familiar part
with the term thing in the place of the whole-object term (e.g., “See this
thing? What color is the ear/pig?”).
Novel part test questions. The novel part test questions (e.g., for the
juxtaposition condition: “See this butterfly? What color is the thorax?”)
probed children’s ability to accurately interpret novel part terms across the
four conditions. Half of the children in each condition received novel part
test questions about animate creatures, and half received novel part test
questions about inanimate objects. All children were asked three novel part
test questions.
Coding. Children’s responses were coded as referring to either a whole
object (when they offered the color of the whole object) or a part (when
they offered the color of the salient part). Children occasionally gave two
or more colors in answer to a single test question. Multicolor responses fell
into two general types. One type was a list of colors that included at least
two of the colors in a given object (e.g., whole-object color, part color, the
color of the black contour lines, or the color of the white page) without any
observable pause between the colors mentioned. For example, one child
responded “blue and black and yellow” when asked about the yellow
bunny with the blue eye. These responses were coded as whole-object
responses. In another type of multicolor response, children offered one
color and then after a clear and protracted pause offered another, almost as
an afterthought. For example, children responded “yellow . . . and the
house is blue” in response to an inquiry about the color of the door, which
was yellow. These responses were coded by noting the first response
offered. If the first response was a part color, as in the example, children
were coded as giving a part response. If the first color was a whole-object
color (e.g., “Blue . . . and yellow,” in response to a question about the color
of the fish, which was blue), children were coded as giving a whole-object
response.
Children received a score of 1 for part responses and 0 for whole-object
responses for each test question. Thus, scores for familiar part and novel
part test questions each ranged between 0 and 3, and scores for the familiar
whole test questions ranged between 0 and 6. Note that for part questions
(i.e., familiar part and novel part test questions) a score of 3 would indicate
that children responded to each test question appropriately, whereas for
familiar whole test questions a score of 0 would indicate they responded
appropriately to each test question.
Results and Discussion
Familiar Item Test Questions
The first question addressed was whether children were able to
respond appropriately to our test questions. Specifically, could
they respond with the whole-object color when asked about a
familiar whole object and the color of the part when asked about
a familiar part? To address this question, in the first analysis we
examined responses children made to the nine test questions involving familiar terms.
Children excelled at these questions. In fact, not a single child
made an error in response to questions about familiar parts across
1
Previous work on children’s recall of familiar words indicated that a
total delay period of 6 s would be more than adequate time for retrieval of
the whole-object term from memory (Cirrin, 1984). Furthermore, the
orienting utterance should work to refocus their attention on the stimulus
object during the delay.
2
Across both studies, analyses of children’s performance on test questions in each condition by age (3 vs. 4) via a Mann–Whitney U test
revealed no differences in responding between the two age groups. Furthermore, independent samples t tests revealed no differences in mean age
in months across any of the conditions.
WHOLE–PART JUXTAPOSITION AS A PRAGMATIC CUE
the four experimental conditions (all Ms ⫽ 3.00, SDs ⫽ 0).3 In
addition, children’s responses to questions about familiar whole
objects were highly accurate. Specifically, children rarely responded with the color of the part; this was true across conditions
(juxtaposition: M ⫽ 0.17, SD ⫽ 0.39; no juxtaposition: M ⫽ 0.67,
SD ⫽ 1.23; delay and frame control: both Ms ⫽ 0.17, SD ⫽ 0.58).
Goodness-of-fit tests comparing individual response patterns to the
distribution predicted by chance revealed that part responding to
familiar whole test questions was below chance in all conditions,
␹2s(6, Ns ⫽ 12) ⱖ 329.38, ps ⬍ .01.4 Clearly, children had little
difficulty with our color question format.
Of course, the primary goal of the current study was to investigate the difference in children’s part-term responding to novel
part test questions across the four conditions. However, before
examining this it was important to establish that any condition
differences that might be revealed in responses to novel part test
questions did not generalize to areas where a difference in responding would not be expected, namely, in children’s responses
to familiar item test questions. That is, the presence or absence of
juxtaposition should not affect children’s responses to familiar
item test questions.
Children’s responses to familiar part test questions clearly did
not differ across the four experimental conditions: In all conditions
their responding was at ceiling. A little variability across conditions emerged in children’s responses to familiar whole test questions, but these differences were not significant in a one-way
analysis of variance (ANOVA), F(3, 44) ⫽ 1.29, ns. The results
from this analysis indicate that a comparison of children’s responses to novel part test questions across the four conditions is
potentially meaningful in that any differences arising across the
four conditions cannot be attributed to general, cross-condition
demand characteristics.
Novel Part Test Questions
Regarding the novel parts, the focal questions were whether and
how juxtaposition enabled children to interpret the novel term as
referring to the part of the object. Preliminary analyses revealed no
significant effects of sex. Therefore, this variable was dropped
from this and all further analyses. The research questions were
evaluated with a 4 (condition: juxtaposition, no juxtaposition,
delay control, frame control) ⫻ 2 (animacy: animate, inanimate)
ANOVA. The analysis revealed no significant main effect of
animacy and no significant Condition ⫻ Animacy interaction. The
analysis revealed a significant main effect of condition, F(3,
40) ⫽ 4.47, p ⬍ .01. In line with our predictions, contrast analyses
revealed that children in the juxtaposition condition gave significantly more part responses to novel part test questions (M ⫽ 2.33,
SD ⫽ 0.89) than did children in the no-juxtaposition condition
(M ⫽ 1.33, SD ⫽ 0.89), LSD, p ⬍ .05. When items, rather than
subjects, were treated as the random variable, the same pattern of
findings emerged, paired ti(5) ⫽ 3.46, p ⬍ .02. Furthermore,
contrast analyses revealed that neither retrieval facilitation nor the
grammatical frame alone could account for children’s tendency to
offer more part responses in the juxtaposition than in the nojuxtaposition condition. In particular, children’s responses to novel
part test questions did not differ across the no-juxtaposition and
delay control (M ⫽ 1.25, SD ⫽ 0.97) and frame control (M ⫽ 0.92,
SD ⫽ 1.00) conditions (LSDs, ns). These effects were maintained
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when items rather than subjects served as the random variable,
paired tis(5) ⱕ 2.00, ns. Furthermore, when both subjects and
items were used as the random variable (LSDs, ps ⬍ .05) paired
tis(5) ⱖ 3.73, ps ⬍ .05, the analyses revealed that children gave
significantly more part responses in the juxtaposition than in the
delay control or frame control conditions.
An additional question concerned how systematic children were
in giving part responses to the novel-word questions in the four
different conditions. Goodness-of-fit tests comparing children’s
patterns of responses to novel part test questions (see Table 2)
against the distribution predicted by chance revealed that children
reliably gave more part responses than would be expected by
chance only in the juxtaposition condition, ␹2(3, N ⫽ 12) ⫽ 23.56,
p ⬍ .01. Interestingly, in the frame control condition, children’s
part responding was significantly below chance, ␹2(3, N ⫽
12) ⫽ 9.78, p ⬍ .03. This finding clarifies that the frame alone was
not helpful in aiding children’s part interpretations, and it perhaps
even hindered inferences about part meaning. Furthermore, in the
no-juxtaposition and delay control conditions, children’s responses
to novel part test questions were not distinguishable from chance,
␹2s(3, Ns ⫽ 12) ⬍ 2.71, ns. Taken together, these findings indicate
two things: First, children were able to use juxtaposition to make
part interpretations, and second, children were not systematic in
their judgments about meaning when juxtaposition was absent.
For the next analyses, children in each condition were categorized as either whole-object responders (zero part responses) or
part responders (all part responses) on the basis of their responses
to novel part test questions. In the juxtaposition condition, not a
single child qualified as a whole-object responder, whereas 7
qualified as part responders. A quite different pattern emerged
when juxtaposition was absent. In the no-juxtaposition condition,
the majority of children responded unsystematically: Just 2 children qualified as whole-object responders, and only 1 qualified as
a part responder. A chi-square test of independence revealed that
children in the juxtaposition condition were likely to be part
responders but that children in the no-juxtaposition condition were
not, ␹2(1, N ⫽ 24) ⫽ 14.00, p ⬍ .01. Children’s patterns of
responding in the delay control (3 whole responders, 1 part responder) and frame control (5 whole responders, 1 part responder)
conditions did not differ from patterns of responding in the nojuxtaposition condition, ␹2s(1, Ns ⫽ 24) ⱕ 0.85, ns. However, the
analysis of children’s pattern of responding in the juxtaposition
versus the delay control and frame control conditions revealed that
children were more likely to be part responders in the juxtaposition
condition than in either of the two control conditions, ␹2s(1, Ns ⫽
24) ⱖ 17.70, p ⬍ .01. These analyses provided further evidence
that in the juxtaposition condition children reliably interpreted the
novel label as a part term.
3
In this and all cases where children’s performance was at ceiling levels,
their responding was greater than chance (binomial p ⬍ .01). Additionally,
when children’s performance was at floor levels, their responding was
below chance (binomial p ⬍ .01).
4
In this and all cases where the direction of children’s chance responding is discussed, an examination of the distribution of children’s responses
was conducted to determine whether their pattern of responding was
best described as being above or below chance (Table 2 displays these
distributions).
SAYLOR, SABBAGH, AND BALDWIN
998
Table 2
Number of Children Giving Zero, One, Two, or Three Part
Responses in Response to Novel Part Test Questions
Part responses
Condition
0
1
2
3
Part responses expected by:
Chance ( fe)
Juxtaposition (Study 1)
No-juxtaposition
Delay control
Frame control
Gesture juxtaposition (Study 2)
Gesture no-juxtaposition
Two-gesture control
1.5
0
2
3
5
2
4
4
4.5
3
5
4
4
3
6
3
4.5
2
4
4
2
2
2
3
1.5
7
1
1
1
5
0
2
Note.
fe ⫽ expected frequency.
Delay Control Condition Manipulation Check
Recall that the delay control was introduced to test whether
whole-object label retrieval aids other than juxtaposition might
enhance children’s part responding. To evaluate the success of the
delay control, an important first question was whether the delay
control condition indeed succeeded in facilitating children’s retrieval of the whole-object label. In the absence of such confirmation it would be difficult to interpret children’s failure to learn
novel part terms in the delay control. Two pieces of data confirmed
such retrieval facilitation. First, 8 of the 12 children in the delay
control condition spontaneously blurted out the whole-object label
of one or more of the three novel part items during one of the
delays (e.g., children blurted “butterfly” during delay following the
experimenter’s “See this?”). In the no-juxtaposition condition,
which lacked the delay retrieval aid, such blurting of the wholeobject label never occurred. It is true that children in the nojuxtaposition condition were given no window of time in which to
blurt, but it is certainly not unheard of for children of this age to
produce speech that overlaps with adult speech.
The latency to children’s test-question responses provides an
even more convincing case that the delay control condition facilitated lexical access. From the videotapes, two coders judged the
latency (in seconds) to children’s correct responses to questions
pertaining to familiar whole-object labels (the clearest test case of
lexical access to the familiar whole-object label) in the nojuxtaposition (M ⫽ 2.20 s, SD ⫽ 0.50) and delay control conditions (M ⫽ 1.82 s, SD ⫽ 0.36). Five participants were independently evaluated by both coders. The mean difference in latency
scores was only 0.45 s, and the coders’ measurements of the
latency duration were highly intercorrelated (Cronbach’s ␣ ⫽ .83).
For the statistical analyses, scores that were more than 2.5 SDs
from the mean were omitted. An independent samples t test revealed that children in the delay control condition gave correct
responses to familiar whole-object test questions at shorter latencies than did children in the no-juxtaposition condition, t(22) ⫽
2.18, p ⬍ .05. Hence, the retrieval cues (delays plus orienting
utterance) appeared to facilitate children’s lexical retrieval in the
delay control condition relative to the no-juxtaposition condition.
Given that the delay control condition effectively facilitated
children’s retrieval of the whole-object label, the question of
primary interest—whether such facilitation translated into higher
levels of part responding in the delay control condition than in the
juxtaposition condition— can be addressed. The analyses reported
previously clarify that children in the delay control condition were
largely unsuccessful at correctly interpreting the novel part terms
and displayed significantly fewer part interpretations than did
children in the juxtaposition condition. Furthermore, even the
children in the delay control condition who blurted out the familiar
whole-object label (hence providing incontrovertible evidence of
having accessed that label systematically) responded unsystematically: Children blurted out the whole-object label on 16 occasions,
but gave part responses on only 54% of those occasions.
Taken together, the findings indicate at least two things. First,
aids to retrieval in the delay control were effective in promoting
recall of whole-object labels. Second, such recall was not sufficient to engender systematic part responding.
Summary
Study 1 supplied clear-cut evidence that children readily utilize
whole–part juxtaposition to interpret novel part terms. Children
were better able to interpret a novel label as referring to a part
when the novel part label was juxtaposed with a known wholeobject label than when no juxtaposition was provided. In fact,
children reliably linked the new term with a part only when a novel
part term was juxtaposed against a familiar whole-object label.
Children’s success at generating part interpretations of novel
words in the presence of juxtaposition was not merely the result of
facilitated retrieval of the whole-object label and subsequent triggering of mutual exclusivity. When children’s retrieval of the
whole-object term was facilitated without juxtaposition, they were
unsuccessful at generating part interpretations for novel labels.
Additionally, the structure of the juxtaposition frame was not
sufficient, in and of itself, to guide children to part interpretations
of novel words. Taken together, these findings indicate that the
presence of the full juxtaposition phrase containing both wholeobject and novel labels is critical for children to achieve part
interpretations of novel terms.
Having ruled out retrieval facilitation and the grammatical
frame as the source of children’s successful part responding in the
juxtaposition condition, a third possible explanation rose to the
fore: children’s use of pragmatic information. Perhaps children
spontaneously attempt to infer speakers’ communicative intentions
and rely on cues that speakers offer in their utterances to help
unravel such intentions. In particular, children might take the
juxtaposition of a novel term (e.g., beak) against a known term
(e.g., bird) as a cue to the adult’s intention to refer to something
different with the new term relative to what had just been referred
to with the known term. The pragmatic account gains plausibility
from a range of recent research clarifying children’s ability to
exploit nonverbal pragmatic cues for word-learning purposes, including gestures (Carpenter, Nagell, & Tomasello, 1998), discourse novelty (Akhtar, Carpenter, & Tomasello, 1996; Diesundruck, Markson, Akhtar, & Reudor, 2001), and line-of-regard and
related attentional cues (e.g., Baldwin, 1993a; Hollich, HirshPasek, & Golinkoff, 2000; Moore, Angelopoulous, & Bennett,
1999; Tomasello, 1999).
WHOLE–PART JUXTAPOSITION AS A PRAGMATIC CUE
Study 2
In Study 2, we directly targeted the pragmatic account of children’s use of juxtaposition. If children indeed use juxtaposition for
pragmatic reasons, they may be able to recognize the juxtaposition
cue even when it is provided in novel ways (e.g., Diesundruck &
Markson, 2001; Tomasello & Akhtar, 1995). Providing juxtaposition in the gestural modality represents one such novel format
(e.g., Namy & Waxman, 1998). In Study 2, we tested a new group
of children in a gesture juxtaposition condition that differed from
the Study 1 verbal juxtaposition condition only with respect to
modality. Juxtaposition in the gestural format involved juxtaposing (a) a gesture tracing a circle around an object, indicating the
whole object (analogous to the whole-object label used in the
Study 1 juxtaposition condition), with (b) a referentially ambiguous point, hovering a few inches over the part of an object
(analogous to the novel, and hence ambiguous, part term used in
Study 1). The pointing gesture used in the present study was
ambiguous in the sense that, taken on its own, it could indicate
either the whole object or the part. If children remain sensitive to
juxtaposition when it is provided through gestures, they should be
able to make use of the juxtaposition between the circling gesture
and the pointing gesture to disambiguate the reference of the
pointing gesture.
Two comparison conditions were included in Study 2 in addition to the gesture juxtaposition condition. The first was a gesture
no-juxtaposition condition. In this condition, only the referentially
ambiguous point was included, analogous to the presence of the
novel part term in the verbal no-juxtaposition condition in Study 1.
Children’s responses in the gesture no-juxtaposition condition
provided information about their success in interpreting the novel
term as a part term in the absence of any juxtaposition information.
Put another way, this condition clarified whether the single point
gesture was indeed ambiguous in meaning for children.
The second comparison condition was a two-gesture control
condition. In this condition, children were exposed to two identical, referentially ambiguous pointing gestures. In this condition, no
juxtaposition information was supplied by the two gestures, because they were identical. The two-gesture control condition was
included to control for the possibility that children might show
increased part responding in the gesture no-juxtaposition condition
relative to the gesture juxtaposition condition simply because they
saw two gestures (in the gesture juxtaposition condition) as opposed to just one (in the gesture no-juxtaposition condition). If
children increased their part responses merely as a result of the
presence of two gestures, then they should show an increased
selection of parts in the two-gesture control condition relative to
the gesture no-juxtaposition condition, despite the fact that no
juxtaposition information was provided in the two-gesture control
condition.
The juxtaposition information in Study 2 was provided only in
the gestural modality. In particular, no juxtaposition information
was provided verbally. Thus, any differences observed in children’s part responding to questions about novel parts would be due
to the gestural, not the verbal, input. The utterances selected to
accompany the gestural information were those previously used in
the no-juxtaposition condition in Study 1. Precisely the same
utterances were used across the three gesture conditions (e.g., “See
this? What color is the thorax?”). Recall that the results from
999
Study 1 indicated that this linguistic information did not assist
children in identifying parts as referents of novel labels. Thus, if
children displayed more part responses in the gesture juxtaposition
condition than in the gesture no-juxtaposition and two-gesture
control conditions, this could only be due to an appreciation for
juxtaposition in the gestural modality.
Method
Participants
Thirty-six children (17 girls and 19 boys) ranging in age from 3 years 1
month to 4 years 6 months (mean age ⫽ 3 years 8 months) participated.
Children were recruited, compensated, and pretested as in Study 1. An
additional 14 children participated but their data were omitted because of
their inability to produce all six color terms (n ⫽ 10) and experimenter
error (n ⫽ 4).
Materials
The stimulus materials for this study were 12 pictures of familiar objects
with a salient part. The pictures were created and presented as in the
previous study. A new stimulus set was constructed so that the relevant
parts were always placed near the center of the whole object. This modification prevented children from noticing over trials that the point always
occurred directly above the distinctly colored part, which might lead to the
inference that the point referred to the part, independently of any juxtaposition information. In all other respects, the objects were identical to those
used in the previous study. For each of the new objects, except for
two (orange boat with a purple crank, green duck with a red wing), the
familiar whole-object labels used were the same as in the previous study
(see Table 3).
Design and Procedure
Pretesting. Pretesting was the same as in Study 1.
Test questions. After pretesting, children were told that they were
going to be asked questions about a few pictures. As in the previous study,
they were asked to respond with only one color to the test questions.
Children’s interpretation of novel part terms was assessed in one of three
conditions: (a) In the gesture juxtaposition condition, children were offered
a circling gesture indicating the whole object during the first half of the test
question and an ambiguous point located several inches above the part
during the second half of the test question (e.g., “See this [circling gesture]? What color is the thorax [ambiguous pointing gesture]?”). (b) In the
gesture no-juxtaposition condition, the experimenter only provided an
ambiguous point during the test question (e.g., “See this [no gesture]? What
color is the thorax [ambiguous pointing gesture]?”). (c) In the two-gesture
control condition, children were offered an additional ambiguous point
during the first half of the test question (e.g., “See this [ambiguous pointing
gesture]? What color is the thorax [ambiguous pointing gesture]?”). In all
three conditions, children were offered the same test questions.
Across all the three conditions, the point over the part was approximately 2 in. (5.08 cm) from the page and was held in place until the
experimenter had offered the target label. The circling gesture in the
gesture juxtaposition condition involved three revolutions around the
whole object and made contact with the page.
The study was conducted in two phases. In the first phase, children were
randomly assigned to either the gesture juxtaposition (n ⫽ 12, mean
age ⫽ 3 years 9 months) or gesture no-juxtaposition (n ⫽ 12, mean age ⫽ 3
years 7 months) condition, with the constraint that there be roughly equal
numbers of boys and girls in each condition. In the second phase, a new
group of children was recruited to participate in the two-gesture control
condition (n ⫽ 12, mean age ⫽ 3 years 8 months).
SAYLOR, SABBAGH, AND BALDWIN
1000
Table 3
Stimuli Used in Study 2
Stimuli
Animacy
Animates
Inanimates
a
Familiar parts
Novel parts
Orange pig with a purple eye
Green duck with a red wing
Yellow bunny with a blue nose
Purple cup with an orange handlea,b
Red car with a green door
Blue house with a yellow window
Purple spider with an orange pedicela
Red butterfly with a green thoraxa
Blue fish with a yellow ventral
Orange boat with a purple crank
Green flower with a red stamena
Yellow shoe with a blue grommet
Used in Study 1 as well.
b
Handle moved to center of cup.
The number and type of questions asked per child was the same as in
Study 1, and counterbalancing was identical. In particular, children were
also asked questions about familiar whole objects and familiar parts to
provide information about the validity of the color questions as an index of
children’s label comprehension. A given child received either gestural
juxtaposition, gestural no-juxtaposition, or two-gesture control gestures for
all three types of test questions (i.e., familiar part, familiar whole, novel
part).
Coding. The coding was the same as in Study 1.
Results and Discussion
Familiar Item Test Questions
As in the previous study, we first checked children’s responses
to test questions concerning familiar items (i.e., familiar wholeobject labels and familiar part labels) to evaluate the validity of the
methodology as a way of probing children’s word comprehension.
Children were skilled at responding to familiar item test questions.
They offered greater-than-chance levels of part responses to questions about familiar parts across all three conditions (gesture
juxtaposition: M ⫽ 2.33, SD ⫽ 0.89; gesture no-juxtaposition:
M ⫽ 2.67, SD ⫽ 0.49; and two-gesture control: M ⫽ 2.75,
SD ⫽ 0.45), ␹2s(3, Ns ⫽ 12) ⱖ 18.22, ps ⬍ .01. Likewise, children
offered lower-than-chance levels of part responses to questions
about familiar wholes (gesture juxtaposition: M ⫽ 0.08,
SD ⫽ 0.29; gesture no-juxtaposition: M ⫽ 0.08, SD ⫽ 0.29; and
two-gesture control: M ⫽ 0.33, SD ⫽ 0.89), ␹2s(6, Ns ⫽ 12) ⱖ
485.00, ps ⬍ .01. Clearly, as in the previous study, children had no
difficulty with our test-question format, clarifying that our innovative color-question methodology provided a solid index of their
comprehension of the whole-object and part labels involved.
We would not expect children’s pattern of responding to the
familiar item test questions to vary across conditions, despite the
fact that the gestures accompanying the questions were not the
same across conditions. If such differences emerged, this would
indicate that the gestural formats themselves altered the general
demand characteristics of the situation for children, rendering it
difficult to interpret any condition differences that might emerge in
further analyses of children’s responses to novel part test questions. However, a 3 (condition: gesture juxtaposition, gesture nojuxtaposition, two-gesture control) ⫻ 2 (familiar item test question: familiar whole, familiar part) mixed within-subjects
ANOVA, with familiar item test question as the within-subjects
variable, revealed no significant main effect for the condition
variable, F(2, 33) ⫽ 0.67, ns. The results from this analysis ruled
out any concern about general demand characteristics differing
across conditions, making subsequent comparison of children’s
responses to the novel part test questions across the three conditions a meaningful enterprise.
Novel Part Test Questions
A 3 (condition: gesture juxtaposition, gesture no-juxtaposition,
two-gesture control) ⫻ 2 (animacy: animate, inanimate) betweensubjects ANOVA was performed to determine whether gestural
juxtaposition was effective in facilitating children’s part-term responding. The analysis revealed no significant main effect of
animacy and no significant Condition ⫻ Animacy interaction.
However, a marginally significant main effect emerged with the
condition variable, F(2, 30) ⫽ 3.04, p ⫽ .06. Planned contrast
analyses revealed that children in the gesture juxtaposition condition offered significantly more part responses (M ⫽ 1.83,
SD ⫽ 1.19) than did children in the gesture no-juxtaposition
condition (M ⫽ 0.83, SD ⫽ 0.72), using both subjects, LSD, p ⬍
.03, one-tailed, and items, paired ti(5) ⫽ 2.93, p ⬍ .04, one-tailed,
as the random variable. Children in the gesture juxtaposition
condition also displayed a marginally higher level of part responses than did children in the two-gesture control condition
(M ⫽ 1.25, SD ⫽ 1.14), using both subjects, LSD, p ⫽ .08,
one-tailed, and items, paired ti(5) ⫽ 1.94, p ⫽ .06, one-tailed, as
the random variable. Finally, children’s responses to novel part test
questions did not differ between the gesture no-juxtaposition and
two-gesture control conditions, using both subjects, t(22) ⫽ 1.07,
ns, and items, paired ti(5) ⫽ 0.881, ns, as the random variable.
To ensure that children’s high level of part responding in the
gesture juxtaposition condition of the current study was comparable to that of children in the Study 1 juxtaposition condition, we
conducted an analysis of the proportion of part responses to novel
part test questions for objects that remained the same across
Studies 1 and 2 (butterfly–thorax, spider–pedicel, and flower–
stamen). The analysis revealed that children’s responses did not
differ between the Study 2 gesture juxtaposition condition and
Study 1 juxtaposition condition, t(22) ⫽ 0.481, ns.
Children in the gesture juxtaposition condition gave part responses to questions about novel parts at greater than chance
levels, ␹2(3, N ⫽ 12) ⫽ 10.22, p ⬍ .01. Interestingly, children in
the gesture no-juxtaposition condition tended to give whole-object
responses to novel part test questions; their part responding was
marginally below chance, ␹2(3, N ⫽ 12) ⫽ 7.56, p ⫽ .06. Children
WHOLE–PART JUXTAPOSITION AS A PRAGMATIC CUE
in the two-gesture control condition were unsystematic in their
responses to questions about novel parts, ␹2(3, N ⫽ 12) ⫽ 5.33, ns
(see Table 2). In sum, children in the two conditions not including
gestural juxtaposition information seemed either to be uncertain
about the meaning of the novel term or to tend to interpret the
novel term as a label for the whole object.
Additionally, on the basis of their responses to novel part test
questions, children in the present study were categorized as being
either whole-object responders (zero whole-object responses) or
part responders (all part responses). In the gesture juxtaposition
condition, only 2 children qualified as whole-object responders,
whereas 5 qualified as part responders. In contrast, the gesture
no-juxtaposition and two-gesture control conditions yielded a different pattern of responding. In the gesture no-juxtaposition condition, 4 children qualified as whole-object responders, and not a
single child qualified as a part responder. Similarly, in the twogesture control condition, 4 children qualified as whole-object
responders, whereas only 2 qualified as part responders. Three
chi-square tests of independence (gesture juxtaposition vs. gesture
no-juxtaposition, gesture juxtaposition vs. two-gesture control, and
gesture no-juxtaposition vs. two-gesture control) revealed that
children’s pattern of responding to the novel part test questions in
the gesture juxtaposition and gesture no-juxtaposition conditions
differed significantly, ␹2(1, N ⫽ 24) ⫽ 11.43, p ⬍ .01, with
children in the gesture juxtaposition condition tending to be part
responders and children in the gesture no-juxtaposition condition
tending to be whole-object responders. Interestingly, the twogesture control condition seemed to yield a different pattern of
responses from both the gesture juxtaposition, ␹2(1, N ⫽
24) ⫽ 3.49, p ⫽ .06, and gesture no-juxtaposition conditions, ␹2(1,
N ⫽ 24) ⫽ 4.00, p ⬍ .01. As predicted by a pragmatic account,
children in the gesture juxtaposition condition tended to be part
responders, whereas children in the two-gesture control condition
did not. At the same time, children were marginally more likely to
be whole-object responders in the gesture no-juxtaposition condition than in the two-gesture control condition. This may simply
have been because the two identical ambiguous points in the
two-gesture control condition confused children, leading them to
be largely unsystematic in their responding, whereas children in
the gesture no-juxtaposition condition tended to systematically
select whole objects.
Summary
Study 2 revealed that children could capitalize on juxtaposition
offered in a novel gesture-based format to learn names for parts of
objects. That is, children used juxtaposition flexibly to infer speakers’ part labeling intention, even when linguistic juxtaposition was
absent. Moreover, as in the previous study, children supplied
systematic part responses only when juxtaposition was available.
This pattern suggests that juxtaposition plays a significant role in
assisting children’s part-term learning.
General Discussion
The present series of studies provided the first evidence that
preschool-aged children are sensitive to the juxtaposition that
parents provide when introducing novel part terms. When juxtaposition was provided, children readily inferred part meanings for
1001
new words. Put another way, juxtaposition facilitated children’s
part-term learning over and above any assistance provided by other
possible contributors, such as mutual exclusivity, general cognitive
skills such as memory and attention, and other conceptual
knowledge.
These studies also strongly suggest that children’s sensitivity to
juxtaposition information can be classified as one aspect of their
pragmatic understanding. The control conditions included in
Study 1 ruled out two alternative explanations. The delay control
clarified that juxtaposition does not simply enhance children’s
access to the whole-object label in memory (thereby better triggering the mutual exclusivity assumption). Even when children in
the delay control condition blurted out the whole-object label
(confirming that they had retrieved it), they responded unsystematically to the question about the novel part term. One implication
of these findings is that juxtaposition between the whole-object
and part labels aids children in interpreting a novel part term only
when the juxtaposition comes from the speaker; it is not sufficient
simply for the juxtaposition to be available in children’s own
minds.
A second control—the frame control condition—further clarified that children do not simply associate the juxtaposition frame
with part meanings. Providing children with the structural frame
that is typical of juxtaposition in the absence of genuine whole–
part juxtaposition left children uncertain about how to interpret the
novel part term.
The findings from Study 1 left a pragmatic account of children’s
sensitivity to juxtaposition as the prime contender. That is, it
seemed likely that children infer part meanings when juxtaposition
is provided because they appreciate that speakers are using juxtaposition to signal an intention to refer to something other than the
whole object.
Study 2 provided a more direct test of the pragmatic account and
found evidence in its favor. In particular, children were presented
with juxtaposition information in a format that was new to them.
Specifically, we offered juxtaposition via gestures: (a) a circling
gesture that was easily interpreted as indicating the whole object
juxtaposed with (b) a pointing gesture otherwise ambiguous in
meaning. Although the pointing and circling gestures used in
Study 2 likely each appear singly in children’s input, the direct
juxtaposition of these gestures is probably rare in parents’ input to
children. Despite the novelty of this gestural format for juxtaposition, children took advantage of the juxtaposition between gestures to systematically infer part meanings, whereas they were
unsystematic when juxtaposition was absent. Such flexible use of
the available information in a novel format—a hallmark of true
pragmatic understanding—strongly suggests that children were
noting the juxtaposition information and using it to draw online
inferences about the speaker’s intended meaning.
Pragmatic Understanding and the Mutual
Exclusivity Assumption
It might seem that the present studies bring into question the role
of the mutual exclusivity assumption in part-term learning. After
all, children inferred part meanings only when juxtaposition information was available, despite the fact that the mutual exclusivity
assumption should have guided them to reject the novel label as a
name for the whole object regardless of whether juxtaposition was
1002
SAYLOR, SABBAGH, AND BALDWIN
present or absent. However, the mutual exclusivity assumption
may nevertheless have played a role in children’s success at
part-term learning when juxtaposition was provided. That is, children may be reluctant to activate the mutual exclusivity assumption until they have reason to believe it is applicable, with juxtaposition providing that reassurance. One way to interpret our
findings, then, is that pragmatic understanding and the mutual
exclusivity assumption work hand-in-hand to facilitate word learning (see Bloom, 2000; Hall & Waxman, in press; Hollich et al.,
2000; Woodward & Markman, 1997, for discussions of this kind
of integrative account). At the same time, however, our findings
nevertheless strongly suggest that mutual exclusivity is triggered
only given the appropriate pragmatic conditions— conditions
sparking children’s recognition that the speaker intends to label
something other than the whole object. A related possibility put
forth by Clark (1987) and others (e.g., Baldwin, 1993b; Bloom,
2000; Diesendruck & Markson, 2001) is that mutual exclusivity
does not exert its action separately from pragmatic information,
but rather the word learning bias is in fact an instantiation of a
pragmatic inference. Either way, the emerging picture is that
pragmatic information holds some primacy in accounting for children’s success in the discovery of new word meanings.
Pragmatic Understanding, Memory, and Attention
The findings from these studies are germane to a current debate
in the language learning literature. In the last decade there has been
a steady influx of work highlighting infants’ and young children’s
capacity to capitalize on sociopragmatic cues such as eye-gaze,
gesture, and discourse novelty when learning the meanings of new
words. Recently, however, Samuelson and Smith (1998) suggested
that the findings from all of these studies might be explained by
children’s use of low-level cognitive mechanisms such as memory
and attention. Our findings argue against this strong claim. In the
control studies in Study 1, we found that neither memory nor
contextual association (i.e., grammatical cues) alone could account
for children’s use of juxtaposition. The data from Study 2 are
especially compelling in this regard. Recall that in the gesture
no-juxtaposition condition, the experimenter circled the whole
object while saying “See this?” and then asked the test question
(e.g., “What color is the thorax?”) while providing an ambiguous
point. The direct effect of the circling gesture would be to enhance
children’s attention to the whole object. Yet, the addition of this
whole object circling gesture had the effect of reducing children’s
whole object responding. Clearly, children’s success at providing
part responses in the gesture juxtaposition condition of Study 2
was not due to simple enhancements of memory or attention.
Children’s increased ability to interpret the new word as referring
to the part in the Study 2 gesture juxtaposition condition could
only have arisen from an appreciation of the pragmatic force
behind the experimenter’s juxtaposition of the two gestures. In the
face of this juxtaposition children inferred that the speaker signaled an intention to label something other than the whole object.
Of course, memory and attention are critical for word learning.
Nevertheless, higher level appreciation for cues to speakers’ referential intentions is also clearly operative in children’s success at
inferring part meanings in these studies.
Pragmatic Understanding as One Skill Among Many
The overarching goal of the current set of studies was to examine whether children can use juxtaposition as a cue to speakers’
labeling intentions. To be sure that children were using juxtaposition as a pragmatic cue, the word-learning situation was pared
down to highlight the possible role of specific alternative mechanisms. For example, in the Study 1 control conditions, we focused
on lexical access and the grammatical frame, respectively, whereas
in Study 2 we specifically targeted pragmatic inferences. Our
results across studies highlighted the powerful role juxtaposition
played in guiding children’s interpretations of novel part terms,
and clarified that neither enhanced lexical access nor sensitivity to
a syntactic frame were the sole source of children’s use of juxtaposition. Pragmatic inferences, in contrast, appear to be the primary force behind children’s success at interpreting new part terms
provided with juxtaposition. However, we think it is nevertheless
likely that children recruit lexical access, syntactic cues, and other
basic cognitive mechanisms in addition to pragmatic understanding in real-life word-learning situations. It would certainly benefit
them to do so. On this view, pragmatic understanding is just one
among a powerful complement of skills children can recruit to
expedite word learning (e.g., Baldwin, 1995; Bloom, 2000; Hall &
Waxman, in press; Hollich et al., 2000; Woodward, 2000; Woodward & Markman, 1997).
Conclusion
In recent years, a wealth of research has detailed children’s
sensitivity to a variety of pragmatic cues, from gaze direction to
anchoring information (Baldwin & Tomasello, 1998; Callanan,
1985, 1989). The present research provides clear evidence of one
additional facet of children’s pragmatic understanding—the ability
to use juxtaposition for part-term learning. These findings provide
striking testament to children’s ability to go beyond the obvious to
draw inferences about speakers’ referential intentions, much to the
benefit of language learning.
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Received June 25, 2001
Revision received June 13, 2002
Accepted June 13, 2002 䡲