Abstract

Adults use lexical contrast to help children learn novel names. Although the Principle of Contrast (Clark, 1983, 1990) was considered as a general principle in the acquisition of word meanings, the lack of empirical evidence made it an post-hoc concept, not a predictable one, To elaborate the principle in more specific way, Au & Laframboise(1990) introduced the concept of 'corrective linguistic contrast'. They have asserted that the linguistic contrast in Mural learning context can be specified as corrective one that is, contrasting children's own label. To prove it, they varied the contrasting words in 3 conditions: no label condition, semantic linguistic contrast condition, and the corrective condition. The children learned the novel words better in corrective linguistic condition than in other conditions. In their semantic contrast condition the contrasting words were too random to find the contrastive meaning, they were implausible negative sentences. If the contrastive words are more plausible, the contrast principle might be applied. The present studies have been designed to test this possibility. These studies examined the lexical contrast effect in the acquisition of novel color names in preschool children. In experiment 1, we replicated Au et al.´s experiment in Korean children. The results showed that novel color name was learned more effectively in the linguistic contrast condition than in the no label condition. The second experiment tested whether the plausible contrast words are more effective than the random contrast words. The contrasting words were selected from the names children used to refer the color in the learning session in experiment 1. The selected solar names were classified as the basic, focal name(white, black, red, blue, green and yellow), and the more specific, subordinate names(e.g., sky blue, purple, brown). Experiment 2 and 3 demonstrated that the natural contrast was more effective than the random contrast condition. In addition, it was found that the subordinate solar was more effective than basic color name as the contrast words in 5 years old children. In experiment 4, we tested the natural contrast effect in the 3, 4 year children. The younger children showed no difference whether the contrast was natural or random. It may be due to the knowledge about color the younger children lack. These findings suggest that it is not the corrective contrast but the natural contrast based on the children's knowledge that facilitates the acquisition of a new term Of course, the corrective contrast is one of the natural contrast. The contrast principle is more general than to limit it as the corrective contrast condition.