Children's Inferences in Generalizing Novel Nouns and Adjectives

By the time children begin to rapidly acquire new word mean-ings they are already able to determine the grammatical cat-egory of novel words based on syntactic and morphological cues. Here we test whether children can leverage this knowl-edge when inferring the meaning of a novel word. Through a novel word learning experiment we determine that children can use this information, drawing different conclusions for the most likely meanings of novel words in distinct grammatical categories. We use a Bayesian model to formalize the higher level knowledge that children might have about noun and ad-jective meanings. Simulations show that children’s behavior reflects the type of shift we would predict on the basis of noun and adjective meanings in the English lexicon