Biomedical subjects

G M Gottfried

Publications and source records attributed to G M Gottfried.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

PubMed1997

Comprehending compounds: evidence for metaphoric skill?

Previous studies of children's comprehension of compound nouns show that three-year-olds can identify the appropriate referent for a compound when shown picture arrays that include salient distractors. The four studies presented here investigate comprehension of one kind of compound, metaphoric compounds (i.e. noun-noun compounds in which one noun expresses similarity to another object, as in catfish). Forty-four three-year-olds, 45 five-year-olds and 22 adults were shown a series of picture arrays and were asked to identify referents of various types of metaphoric compounds. The arrays included target pictures that had metaphoric resemblances based on shape (e.g. bug shaped like a stick) or on colour/pattern (e.g. shells with black and white stripes, like a zebra). Results showed that three- and five-year-olds can comprehend a shape-based metaphoric compounds such as stick-bug, even when faced with salient distractors (e.g. a stick, a bug next to a stick). The younger children had some difficulty with colour-based compounds, such as zebra-shells. Overall, five-year-olds outperformed three-year-olds but performed significantly less well than adults. However, even at age 3, children did not show a general expectation to interpret the compounds literally.

Age Factors↗

PubMed1997

Using metaphors as modifiers: children's production of metaphoric compounds.

Although much research has investigated children's use of metaphoric language, methodological concerns raise questions about the conclusions, and it remains unclear whether preschoolers can produce metaphors. These studies employed a new methodology to test children's ability to produce metaphors incorporated into metaphoric compounds. In two studies, 59 children aged 2:8-4:3, 63 children aged 4:4-6:1, and 34 adults participated in elicited production tasks. In Study 1, subjects in the COMPOUND condition corrected a puppet's incorrect compound labels for pictures that had metaphoric resemblances to other objects (e.g. 'leaf-bug' for a bug shaped like a stick). Subjects in the NONMETAPHORIC condition heard incorrect compounds describing pictures without obvious metaphoric resemblance (e.g. 'leaf-bug' for a round black beetle). Children in the REVERSAL condition heard compounds with nouns reversed (e.g. 'bug-leaf' for the stick-bug) to discover whether children distinguished between the literal and metaphoric labels. Study 2 provided an additional test of children's metaphoric-literal distinction. Results showed that children as young as 3:0 produced intentional, appropriate metaphors incorporated into compound nouns when the stimuli and puppet's labels primed recognition of metaphoric similarity and compound production. Moreover, children showed evidence of a distinction between literal and metaphoric labels. The data show that preschool children have an early ability to use metaphoric language but that significant developmental change occurs between the ages of 3:0 and 5:0 as well as beyond 5:0. Additionally, metaphoric language in preschoolers is not limited to single-word renamings.

Child↗

PubMed1996

Specifying the relation between novel and known: input affects the acquisition of novel color terms.

4 studies investigate how differential input affects preschoolers' abilities to learn novel color words. 3-, 4-, and 5-year-old children saw objects in novel shapes and colors and heard a novel color label for the object. Labels were presented through ostensive definition (e.g., "See, it's mauve"), corrective linguistic contrast (e.g., "See, it's not purple; it's mauve"), or an inclusion statement (e.g., "See, it's mauve; it's a kind of purple"). 4- and 5-year-old children interpreted the novel word as a shape term when ostensive information was provided but as a color term when additional information, either contrastive or inclusive, specified a relation between the novel term and a known label for that color. Furthermore, children who consistently interpreted the novel word as a color word tended to treat the novel and known labels as mutually exclusive color terms if they heard contrastive information, whereas they tended to treat the words as hierarchically related if they heard inclusion information. 3-year-olds generally did not make use of either type of information in determining the semantic domain of the novel word or the relation between terms.

Child↗