A shape-heavy vocabulary does not a shape bias make: A comparison of the content of English-learning children's and Spanish-learning children's typical vocabularies

We asked why Spanish-monolingual children exhibit a weaker, slower-to-develop shape bias in word-learning contexts compared to English-monolingual children (Hahn & Cantrell, 2012). Ten English-monolingual adults and nine EnglishSpanish bilingual adults rated the perceptual similarity of items indicated by subsets of words from the English MCDI and Spanish MCDI, respectively. Consistent with previous research with similar methodology (Samuelson & Smith, 1999), words for shape-similar items predominated in the content of the English MCDI (47.72%; agreement: 70%, p < .05). Interestingly, words for shape-similar items also predominated in the content of the Spanish MCDI (56.67%; agreement: 70%, p < .05). Results suggest that the types of words that children learn play a less important role in the development of the shape bias than other proposed factors (e.g., syntactical regularities; Smith, 2000). Additional findings and implications for children with various language backgrounds will be discussed.