A unique study has thrown fascinating new light on how young children begin to understand the meaning of words. The findings by the researchers, from The University of Manchester are published in the journal Child Development. Children start to say words around their first birthday, and for a while only say one word at a time, though they rapidly build their vocabulary during their second year.
But the researchers found they do not do this by adding a complete form of new words to their own personal dictionary. Instead, they put a new word in their dictionary which has some, but not all of the meaning, slowly fine tuning it as they hear more language. To show how children do this, the researchers set up a study in Manchester Museum, working with a group of three to eight-year olds.
An experimenter built either 4 blocks stacked up, or 4 blocks lined up flat on a table, and then the children were asked to respond to different size words by building a bigger, smaller or taller version. The researchers compared how their structure differed from the experimenter’s in each dimension , using mathematical modelling to describe what types of changes children made, and how patterns varied with age. Three and four-year-olds tended to treat bigger, smaller, and taller with the same meaning: they built things that were bigger in all directions.
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