Poster #78 - The role of language in preschoolers' understanding of antonyms

• In Event: Poster Session 14

Abstract

The ability to understand abstract semantic relations, and to reason about different instantiations of the same relation, is central to human cognition. Though children are not formally taught the antonym relation until elementary school, evidence suggests that they develop an understanding of some antonyms as early as age four (Phillips & Pexman, 2015). Here we examined how four- and five-year-olds (N = 107) perform in an analogy task involving antonyms from three different lexical classes: adjectives (e.g., hot:cold) verbs (run:walk) and nouns (summer:winter). We also investigated the extent to which language cues facilitate children’s ability to reason about the antonym relation. In order to avoid the constraints of a verbal task, we used a pictorial analogy task intended to measure children’s ability to solve analogy problems in a classic A:B::C:D format based on pairs of antonyms. We found that accuracy on the analogy task increased with age, and was facilitated by providing a verbal label ("opposite") for the relation (Figure 1). There were no reliable differences due to lexical class, although the trend favored problems based on adjective antonyms (Figure 2). Given previous evidence that children tend to acquire nouns earlier than adjectives and verbs, the present findings suggest that developmental trends in reasoning about the antonym relation do not simply mirror children’s lexical development. A future step will be to investigate variability in how both children and adults generate antonym pairs across different lexical classes.

Authors

• Amalia Ionescu, University of California - Los Angeles
  Presenting Author

• Hongjing Lu, UCLA

• Keith J. Holyoak, UCLA

• Catherine Sandhofer, University of California - Los Angeles