Children’s learning of subordinate level meanings from single/compound words and how it relates to language-wide statistics.

In word learning, children need to identify the referents of the words and decide on their level of category. Previous research found that English-speaking children are more likely to generalize compound words to the subordinate level than single words. But is this linguistically universal, and what is the relationship between the distributions of single/compound words in a language and their semantic generalizations? In this study, we tested children's generalizations of single and compound words in Mandarin Chinese. We started with a corpus analysis of child-directed speech looking at the frequencies of single/compound words and how they correspond to subordinate/basic-level categories. While compounding is more prevalent than single words in Mandarin (different from English), Mandarin compound words are more likely to belong to the subordinate level (similar to English). We generated contrasting hypotheses based on these two features and tested these hypotheses with 202 3- and 5-year-old Mandarin-speaking children, manipulating the morphological status of novel words (single/compound), and whether learning scenarios did not involve semantic contrast (Experiments 1 and 2) or did (Experiments 3 and A1). We found evidence that Mandarin-learning children do not use compounding to generalize at the subordinate level. Rather, our findings suggest that the primary reason for children to arrive at the subordinate level is semantic contrast, where 5-year-olds would mainly generalize at the subordinate level with semantic contrast, but 3-year-olds generalize equally at the basic and subordinate levels. We discuss why a certain language feature may be used for generalization during language acquisition. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).