Incremental Language Learning: Two and Three Year Olds’ Acquisition of Adjectives

Prior research reports that children up to 3-years-old map novel adjectives to object properties only in very limited situations (Gelman & Markman, 1985; Taylor & Gelman, 1988; Hall, Waxman, & Hurwitz, 1993; Klibanoff & Waxman, 1997; Waxman & Markow, 1997). Yet we know by 24-months children use adjectives. In two experiments we provide 36-month-olds (Experiment 1) and 24-month-olds (Experiment 2) with rich cross-situational and syntactic information. We show that 24& 36-month-olds learn adjective-to-property mappings when given multiple examples of the mapping, and when object names are used. We claim that previous experiments failed to find robust adjective acquisition because at least one of these sources of information (multiple exemplars) was excluded. We also suggest that children’s initial learning about the meanings of adjectives is affected by syntactic properties of the noun phrase in which they appear.