In this research project, Dr Marta Ponari and colleagues examine when children learn abstract words and concepts and what factors support their acquisition. The findings have important implications for educators, speech therapists and research.
More about Dr Marta Ponari
Full text of paper
About
Abstract words (e.g. ‘hope’, ‘idea’) help us communicate effectively with each other in a wide range of situations. The ability to grasp and manipulate abstract ideas is a fundamental element of all academic endeavour. Despite their importance very little has been known about how and when children learn abstract words and concepts, or what factors support their acquisition. Some evidence suggests that children with atypical language development, such as children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) or Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) would find it especially hard to learn abstract concepts, but there was no scientific evidence of this so far. The research project: Learning Abstract Concepts: The Role of Linguistic and Affective Development by Professor Gabriella Vigliocco, Professor Courtenay Norbury (both UCL) and Dr Marta Ponari (University of Kent) provides first evidence concerning these questions relating to how and when children learn abstract concepts.
Research objectives
• When do children learn abstract words and concepts?
• What are the words and concepts learnt at different ages?
• What are the factors supporting learning of abstract words and concepts?
• Are abstract concepts especially hard to learn for atypically developing children?
Programme and methodology
Multiple studies were run using different methodologies:
• To investigate the age of learning words and concepts, the researchers analysed an existing large database on “age-of-acquisition” (AoA) norms for more than 10,000 English words. The database contains ratings provided by adults asked to indicate when themselves had learnt all sorts of words. They looked at the relationship between AoA and properties of the word such as whether it refers to concrete things or abstract entities, and whether it refers to things that are considered emotionally positive, negative or neutral.
• To investigate how typically developing children process abstract and concrete words, researchers asked children to recognise words in a lexical decision task, in which children are asked to recognise auditorily presented words among fake words.
• To explore how children with DLD understand abstract words, researchers asked children with DLD (mean age 10.4) and TD children (one group matched to the DLD children for age, and another group matched for vocabulary) to recognise real words among fake words and to provide definitions for abstract and concrete words.
• To explore how children with ASD understand abstract words, researchers asked a group of children with a diagnosis of ASD (and a control group of TD children) to carry out spoken recognition of abstract and concrete words and define these words.
• Finally, to find out what factors are supporting learning of those words, researchers taught children (aged 7-10) 24 abstract words they did not know engaging them in fun small group activities. Some of the words they learnt had emotional associations (e.g., “karma”), some were neutral (e.g., “analogy”). Moreover, sometimes the words were taught in the context of other emotional words, and sometimes only in the context of neutral words.
Findings
• Abstract words make up less than 10% of children’s vocabulary at age 4, but there’s a steep increase in their acquisition at around 8-9 years of age. The first abstract words at the age of four are emotion words such as “happy” and “sad” and other words with emotional associations. Up to the age of nine, children were better able to recognize abstract words with emotional (especially positive) associations. No difference between words with or without emotional associations was found after this age (Ponari et al., 2017).
• Children with Developmental Language Disorder were less accurate in recognising words and less able to provide definitions that their typically developing peers of the same age, but there was no indication of a greater impairment for abstract than concrete words (Ponari et al., 2018).
• No evidence was found that children with ASD have general problems with abstract words and concepts, despite their putative difficulties with abstract words referring to “theory of mind”. Importantly, we also found that children with ASD do not have general problems with words with emotional associations (Ponari, Norbury & Vigliocco, in preparation).
• For children in school years three and four (7-9 years old approximately) we can conclude that emotional associations of the word affects its’ learning, whereas it does not matter whether the teaching context is emotional or not (Ponari, Norbury & Vigliocco, in preparation).
Impact
• The findings offer important and practical suggestions to educators:
• Primary school practices to teaching abstract words and concepts in Years 1-4 should take advantage of the fact that children show greater knowledge and learn more easily abstract words that have emotional associations until about the age of nine. After this age, children seem to be equally good at learning abstract words with and without emotional associations.
• The findings offer important implications for therapy:
• Speech-language therapy interventions for children with language impairments should explicitly encompass both concrete and abstract vocabulary and highlight different sources of meaning (linguistic, emotional, and tangible). It is likely that vocabulary will need to be explicitly taught, as deriving meaning from linguistic context appears to be challenging for these children.
• ASD children with language impairment, and ASD children without language impairments should be considered as two qualitatively distinct groups and, therefore benefitting from different support. In particular, speech-language therapy interventions, should be especially helpful for children with ASD and language impairment, while potentially unnecessary for children with ASD and no language impairment. For this latter group, vocabulary achievement across semantic domains (concrete and abstract) is not lagging behind.