Surprise in the Learning of Color Words

In two experiments, we investigate whether, in English, children’s difficulty learning color adjectives might stem from their overwhelming tendency to be used in prenominal position (e.g., “blue cup”), where word order causes the adjective to arrive ahead of its meaning, rather than post-nominal presentation (e.g., “the cup is blue”), where the meaning cues the word. We consider factors of sequencing from the point of view of models of animal learning. Results indicate that children as young as 2 years begin to reliably master color words when hearing them in training presented post-nominally, but not pre-nominally, and that adults challenged with learning novel color categories are affected by the same ordering effects. We suggest that children’s difficulty with color word learning is in part due to the challenge of having to make predictions from words to the properties they refer to, rather than being able to make predictions from the world to the words.