Fast mapping
Since we’ve seen a lot of new people and done a lot of new things in the past few weeks, Lindsay’s vocabulary has virtually exploded. She says a couple new words a day, and I can’t keep up with all the new words that she knows. Her recall is good too. She learned the word “boat” last night in the bathtub while playing with her toy boats, and this morning she saw a picture of Noah’s Ark and correctly identified it as a boat. The little tub toys really didn’t look much like the illustrated ark, but she understood what a boat did — it floats, and sometimes people or things go in the boat. I thought that was actually pretty perceptive.
I’m also interested to see what names she uses for things or animals she doesn’t already know. This morning she was watching an animal video, and she thought for a moment and then made a guess at some of the exotic animals. She called the otters “kitties,” which makes some sense because of their whiskers. She called a water buffalo a cow. More interestingly, she called a lizard a turtle. I thought this was interesting because the shape of the lizard is really quite different from a turtle, but she already identifies that the lizard and the turtle are related. I’m not sure she quite understands the concept of reptile, but she’s on her way.
Language is such a fluid thing, so I’m continually entertained and impressed with how fast she picks up the words. Her retention is really improving. Speech and language are part of what sets humans apart from the rest of the animal world. The ability to learn and immediately retain words is sometimes known as “fast mapping,” and it’s fun to see it in action with Lindsay. I recently learned of and read an article in Science Magazine about a few dogs who have been found to have this same fast mapping ability. Of the hundreds of dogs they have examined, scientists have only found two dogs with this ability. Both are border collies, a breed which has been bred over hundreds of years to understand and obey a variety of words and signals as part of their animal herding duties. So while only the most intelligent and carefully bred dogs have this ability, any old two-year-old can fast map thousands of words. People are very clever animals, and our little animal is fun to watch. If anyone else likes nerdy stuff like this, the Science article is here and the radio article where I first heard about it is here.
I’m also interested to see what names she uses for things or animals she doesn’t already know. This morning she was watching an animal video, and she thought for a moment and then made a guess at some of the exotic animals. She called the otters “kitties,” which makes some sense because of their whiskers. She called a water buffalo a cow. More interestingly, she called a lizard a turtle. I thought this was interesting because the shape of the lizard is really quite different from a turtle, but she already identifies that the lizard and the turtle are related. I’m not sure she quite understands the concept of reptile, but she’s on her way.
Language is such a fluid thing, so I’m continually entertained and impressed with how fast she picks up the words. Her retention is really improving. Speech and language are part of what sets humans apart from the rest of the animal world. The ability to learn and immediately retain words is sometimes known as “fast mapping,” and it’s fun to see it in action with Lindsay. I recently learned of and read an article in Science Magazine about a few dogs who have been found to have this same fast mapping ability. Of the hundreds of dogs they have examined, scientists have only found two dogs with this ability. Both are border collies, a breed which has been bred over hundreds of years to understand and obey a variety of words and signals as part of their animal herding duties. So while only the most intelligent and carefully bred dogs have this ability, any old two-year-old can fast map thousands of words. People are very clever animals, and our little animal is fun to watch. If anyone else likes nerdy stuff like this, the Science article is here and the radio article where I first heard about it is here.
2 comments:
That's really interesting.
Looks like your links are missing, though.
Sorry about that. I recently enabled Blogger in Draft as my default dashboard, but the wretched edit links on the page still take me to the old Dashboard, which then screws up the post's formatting. It just took me about an hour to figure out why it was getting scrambled.
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