ACQUIRING COLOR NAMES VIA LINGUISTIC CONTRAST - THE INFLUENCE OF CONTRASTING TERMS

Linguistic contrast of the form “It's not X; it's Y” is often used by adults to correct children's naming errors. The present studies examined whether such linguistic contrast could help preschoolers learn a novel color name. In Experiment 1, a novel color term was contrasted only once with 1 or 2 familiar color names. Contrasting a new color term with children's own label for the stimulus color helped 5‐year‐olds learn the new term, but contrasting the new term with randomly chosen familiar color terms did not. For 4‐year‐olds, neither kind of contrast helped much. Experiments 2 and 3 showed that when the contrastive information was presented more than once, even 3‐ and 4‐year‐olds performed much like the 5‐year‐olds in Experiment 1. Together, these findings suggest that contrasting a new term with a child's own term facilitates the acquisition of the new term, perhaps because it gives the child specific information about how two terms are related in meaning. Copyright © 1990, Wiley Blackwell. All rights reserved