Over the last several years, we’ve been particularly taken with the question of how kids learn... color words... The test was not designed to trip kids up. Far from it—we only tested basic color words, and we never made kids pick between confusable shades, like red and pink. To an adult, the test would be laughably easy. Yet, after several months of testing two-year olds, I could count my high scorers on one hand. Most would fail the test outright...More re the methodology and the technique at Scientific American, via Not Exactly Rocket Science. Photo source.
Divorced from context, most two and three-year olds might as well be colorblind; certainly they look that way when asked to correctly identify colors in a line-up, or accurately use color words in novel contexts. What’s more, psychologists have found that even after hours and hours of repeated training on color words, children’s performance typically fails to noticeably improve, and children as old as six continue to make major color naming errors...
As it happens, English color words may be especially difficult to learn, because in English we throw in a curve ball: we like to use color words “prenominally,” meaning before nouns. So, we’ll often say things like “the red balloon,” instead of using the postnominal construction, “the balloon is red.”...
That was the idea, anyway, and the prediction was simple: using color words after nouns should make colors far easier to learn, and should make kids far faster at learning them. To test this, we took a couple dozen two-year olds and gave them some quick training on color words...
We found that the kids who got the postnominal training improved significantly over their baseline test scores, whereas the ones who got the prenominal training still looked just as confused as ever...
Interesting that this should appear here today. Yesterday, I was trying to teach my 19 month old granddaughter the names of the colors. It seemed like a good idea because she has just recently learned the word purple, which is the color of her favorite outfit. She didn't seem to be getting it though. Instead, she uses purple to describe anything she happens to like. Thus, her red, starkly shoes are "purple shoe" and her oatmeal, raisin cookie was "purple kee".
ReplyDeleteVery interesting. I hope you read the original article and not just my excerpts - and perhaps try the "adjective-after-noun" technique on her?
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