ISSN 1671-3710
CN 11-4766/R
主办:中国科学院心理研究所
出版:科学出版社

›› 2012, Vol. 20 ›› Issue (5): 690-697.

• 研究前沿 • Previous Articles     Next Articles

The Phenomenon of Shape Bias in Children’s Language Development and Its Cognitive Mechanism

YE Pan-Qin;LI Fu-Hong;CHEN Qing-Fei;QIAO Jing; LI Hong   

  1. (School of Psychology, Southwest University, Chongqing 400715, China)
    (Sino-Canadian Centre for Research in Child Development, Chongqing 400715, China)
  • Received:2011-10-08 Revised:1900-01-01 Online:2012-05-15 Published:2012-05-15
  • Contact: LI Hong

Abstract: Shape bias, which is well known in language development of children, refers to the phenomenon that children tend to extend the name of target objects to test objects sharing the same shape. This phenomenon has been observed on the performance of three years old or even younger children in some paradigms, such as the words extension, category and inductive reasoning. Following studies have found that this phenomenon was modulated by various factors, including the attributes of stimulus, intention of designer, causal/comparative relation and social-pragmatic cues. There are two different theoretical explanations for the shape bias: the association view and conceptual view. However, until now, these theories haven’t been integrated yet. Future studies are necessary to further explore the neural mechanism of shape bias in terms of neurobiological approach, cross-cultural studies and special samples.

Key words: shape bias, cognition, language development, children