Two studies examined the hypothesis that children rely on name representations, often indexed by shape, in their semantic representations. Results suggest that, although shape plays an important role in children's early naming, other factors are also important, including the mental state of the picture's creator (whether intentional or not).…

An exploratory study probed the extent to which children rely on category membership to guide their inferences. A total of 60 children, 4 years of age, were shown 20 sets of pictures of various animals, plants, and minerals. Each set consisted of representations of three objects having two salient features: perceptual similarity/dissimilarity and…

Four studies examined the influence of essentialist information such as internal properties and perceptual similarity on 3-, 4-, and 5-year olds' interpretations of labels. Results suggested that children have essentialist beliefs about animals, but not about artifacts, and that these beliefs interact with children's assumptions about word meaning…

Two experiments examining adults' use of dimensional adjectives focused specifically on the distinction made between height and overall size as determiners of "bigness." The subjects in both experiments were college students. In the first, the hypothesis that the meaning of "big" shifts as a function of the object being…