“Look! A doggy!”, says a child, proudly pointing at a cow in an open field. Most adults would correct the child, explaining that it is a cow, not a doggy, but would probably wonder how on earth this child was confusing a 600kg livestock with a family pet. What is going on in the child’s head when they do this? It turns out that lots of kids make these kinds of mistakes, doing strange things like calling all kinds of fruit ‘apples’ or all four-legged animals ‘doggy’’. But surely no parent is telling their child that a cow is a doggy, so where do so many kids get this idea from?
That’s what we decided to find out. We thought that maybe, when children learn words, they have a general idea of what the word means, but it’s not complete. After all, parents are not reciting dictionary definitions to children to teach them words or showing them every type of dog when they hear the word ‘doggy’! Instead, kids find patterns as they hear the word used in different ways! That might be why kids do things like call cow a ‘doggy’. Doggies after all can be different sizes and colours, and are often found standing on four legs in grassy areas, so if your idea of what a dog is isn’t quite right, a cow might be a good match! But over time, with more examples, kids fine-tune their definitions of words to be more complete.
So how do we figure out if kids are doing this? We teamed up with students from the Nuffield Research Placement Scheme [ link to the blog about the Nuffield Students] who helped us come up with a way! We decided to look at how children use size words, like bigger, smaller, and taller. We used these words because they have some overlap in meaning (they are all about size), so if children have incomplete idea of the words, they might treat them as all meaning the same thing - even when they actually mean the opposite, like bigger and smaller! To see what kids think these words mean, one researcher built something with blocks and then asked children to build something that differed in size (“Can you build one that’s bigger?”).
We found, as demonstrated in recent research (Ferry, Corcoran, Williams, Curtis, Gale, & Twomey, 2024), that 3- and 4-year-olds tended to treat bigger, smaller, and taller with the same meaning: they built things that were bigger in all directions! By about age 5, kids generally figured out that smaller meant they should use fewer blocks. But it was not until about age 7 that kids have reliably figured out that taller really means bigger but specifically in the ‘up’ direction.
It seems that when kids first learn words, they pick up a general idea of words. This seems to be how we end up with kids calling a cow a dog, even though they’ve never heard an adult do that! But with more experience they fine tune their word meanings. You can try our size word study at home with just a set of blocks. Line up four blocks in a row and ask your little scientist to build their own that is bigger, smaller, or taller. Are their word meanings complete yet? If not, don’t worry, kids will figure these things out over time as they hear more language and see how it’s used! But you can always help kids by finding opportunities to talk with them — that lets them figure out what words actually mean!
Reference:
- Ferry, A. L., Corcoran, M. G., Williams, E., Curtis, S. M., Gale, C. J., & Twomey, K. E. (2024). Bigger versus smaller: Children's understanding of size comparison words becomes more precise with age Child Development
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