Browsing by Author "Turner, Juanita N."

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    The influence of object pre-exposure on two-year-olds' disambiguation of novel labels
    (Cambridge University Press, 2005-02) Graham, Susan; Turner, Juanita N.; Henderson, Annette M. E.
    We investigated whether manipulating the perceived novelty of nameless objects would influence two-year-olds' tendency to map novel words to these objects. In Experiment 1, children who had been pre-exposed to target nameless objects were more likely to map novel words onto those objects than children who were not pre-exposed to the objects or children who were pre-exposed to non-target members of the nameless object categories. In Experiment 2, children who were pre-exposed to a nameless object were more likely to assign the novel label to that object than to either a familiar object or an unfamiliar object that had not been pre-exposed. The results of these studies suggest that reducing the novelty of nameless objects increases two-year-olds' tendency to map a novel word to a nameless object.
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    The effect of planning on preschoolers' reality monitoring errors
    (2001) Turner, Juanita N.; Graham, Susan
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    When hearsay trumps evidence: How generic language guides preschoolers’ inferences about unfamiliar things
    (Routledge, 2008-01) Chambers, Craig G.; Graham, Susan A.; Turner, Juanita N.
    Two experiments investigated 4-year-olds’ use of descriptive sentences to learn non-obvious properties of unfamiliar kinds. Novel creatures were described using generic or non-generic sentences (e.g., These are pagons. Pagons/These pagons are friendly). Children’s willingness to extend the described property to a new category member was then measured. The results of Experiment 1 demonstrated that children reliably extended the property to new instances after hearing generic but not non-generic sentences. Further, the influence of generic language was much greater than effects related to amount of tangible evidence provided (the number of creatures bearing the critical property). Experiment 2 revealed that children continued to extend properties mentioned in generic descriptions even when incompatible evidence was presented (e.g., an example of an unfriendly ‘pagon’). The findings underscore preschoolers’ keen understanding of the semantics of generic sentences and suggest that inferences based on generics are more robust than those based on observationally-grounded evidence.