Kids dont give words special power to mark their worlds

Updated on: Saturday, December 31, 2011

A new study has dispelled the myth that young children use language just as adults do to help classify and understand objects in the world around them.

In the study, involving four to five-year-old children, researchers at Ohio State University found the labels adults use to classify items words like "dog" or "pencil" don't have the same ability to influence thinking of children.

"As adults, we know that words are very predictive. If you use words to guide you, they won't often let you down. But for children, words are just another feature among many to consider when they're trying to classify an object.

"For example, suppose that someone you trust shows you an object that looks like a pen and says that it is a tape recorder," Vladimir Sloutsky, who led the team, said.

He added: "You might think it was some kind of spy tool, but you would not have a hard time understanding it as a tape recorder even though it looks like a pen. Adults believe words do have a unique power to classify things, but young children don't think the same way."

According to the researchers, the results suggest that even after children learn language, it doesn't govern their thinking as much as scientists believed. "It is only over the course of development that children begin to understand that words can reliably be used to label items," he said.

The study, published in the 'Psychological Science' journal, involved two related experiments.

Sloutsky said the findings add to understanding of how language affects cognition and may help parents teach their children. "In the past, we thought that if we name the things for children, the labels will do the rest: children would infer that the two things that have the same name are alike in some way or that they go together. We can't assume that anymore," he said.

Kids dont give words special power to mark their worlds

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