Compositionality and Statistics in Adjective Acquisition: 4-year-olds Interpret Tall and Short Based on the Size Distributions of Novel Noun Referents

We investigated 4-year-olds’ understanding of adjective/nouncompositionality and their sensitivity to statistics when interpretingscalar adjectives. In Experiments 1 and 2, children selected tall andshort itemsfrom nine novel objects called pimwits (1-9” in height), or from this arrayplus four taller or shorter distractor objects of the same kind. Changingthe height distributions of the sets shifted children’s judgments of whatcounted as tall and short. However, when distractors differed in name andsurface features from targets, in Experiment 3, judgments did not shift. InExperiment 4, dissimilar distractors did affect judgments when theyreceived the same name as targets. We conclude that 4-year-olds deploy acompositional semantics that is sensitive to statistics and mediated bylinguistic labels.