Abstract:
The purpose of this study was to examine firstly, whether young children are able to use a complexity heuristic as a constraint on hypotheses about novel word meanings; and secondly, to explore how this ability relates to the development of other linguistic and metalinguistic abilities, particularly reading. A series of three studies were conducted to examine these abilities and relations in children aged between 4 1/2 and 7 1/2 years. Fifty-seven children from six preschools in the Wellington region participated in the first stage of this study; and 52 were retested in a second stage of this study approximately one year later in primary school. A third study was conducted to assess these same abilities and relations in a separate and slightly older sample of children. In each of the three studies a battery of individual assessments were made including baseline measures of general nonverbal and verbal intelligence for each subject sample; measures of the complexity heuristic comprising the picture-word game; and measures of metalinguistic ability, including rhyming, segmentation and print awareness tasks; and reading ability.
Results from the three studies showed that generally children in this age group were unable to make use of a complexity heuristic in the acquisition of novel word meanings, at least as measured by the picture-word game; and secondly, there was no evidence to support a relation between the ability to use this heuristic and the development of metalinguistic abilities including reading. Some evidence for a weak but positive association between the ability to use a complexity heuristic and general cognitive ability was obtained.
Results provide no evidence for the existence of a complexity heuristic as a constraint on hypotheses about novel word meanings in young children. Rather, they suggest that if the picture-word game does comprise metalinguistic elements, it may be that young children lack sufficient cognitive ability to deal with other analogical reasoning components inherent in it; alternatively, children may need a more advanced level of both metalinguistic and cognitive ability for the emergence of this heuristic, consistent with development occurring later in middle childhood.
