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The Early Childhood Learning Knowledge Centre will have a booth at this international meeting on early childhood.
Also, CCL's Julie Bélanger, research analyst and D. Geoffrey Hall from the University of British Columbia are doing a presentation describes a two-part study that addresses the questions of when and how children learn to assign new words to their appropriate lexical categories, as well as their associated meanings, specifically focusing on infants’ understanding of count nouns and proper names.
Some estimate that children understand over 10,000 words by the time they are six years old, an impressive accomplishment considering the context in which children commonly face the task of learning words.
In a typical situation, a child’s attention will be directed at an object or event (e.g., a dog running in the park) and a speaker will utter a new word in reference to the situation (e.g., “Dog”). The child is then faced with a number of logically possible lexical categories to assign to the word, each associated with a specific kind of meaning. For example, the child could correctly interpret “dog” as a count noun referring to the category of dogs, but other possible interpretations include that of a verb referring to the action of barking, an adjective referring to a property (such as the colour) of the dog, or a proper name referring to the specific dog.
More details on the studies’ methods and results can be consulted in a poster presented at the event.
For more information, please visit the conference website.