Shape and the first hundred nouns

This paper reports evidence from a longitudinal study in which children’s attention to shape in a laboratory task of artificial noun learning was correlated with a rate shift in noun acquisitions. Eight children were tested in the laboratory at 3-week intervals beginning when they had less than 25 nouns in their productive vocabulary (M age5 17 months). Children were presented with a novel word generalization task at each session. Addi-tionally, the study examined the kinds of words the children learned early, based on parent reports, and the statistical regularities inherent in those vocabularies. The results indicate that as children learned nouns, they also learned to attend to shape in the novel word task. At the same time, children showed an acceleration in new noun production outside of the laboratory. Shape is a feature that human infants appear ready to notice (Johnson, 2001; Spelke, 1990). Attention to shape is essential to the everyday recognition of ob-jects (Biederman, 1987; Rosch, Mervis, Gray, Johnson, & Boyes-Braem, 1976) and to the nouns that domi-nate the speech young children hear (Poulin-Dubois, Graham, & Sippola, 1995; Sandhofer, Smith, & Luo, 2000). Much research has been devoted to establish-ing the importance of shape to successful noun learning. In studies that examine children’s under-standing of how nouns link to object categories, in-vestigators have found a general tendency to extend novel names to solid things that share a commo