Children's responses show whether they generalize the expression beyond the individual to which it was applied, or whether they take the expression to refer only to the original individual. This study also examines children's willingness to assign a familiar proper name to an object which would not ordinarily be named, that is, to a bottle. In particular, we are exploring if young children can use two different proper names to infer that there are two different objects in a box into which they cannot easily see. We show children a box with a slit through which we can put things into the box and take things out of the box. We then ask children what they think is in the box and allow them to reach into the box.
Children sometimes see just one animal pulled out twice but called by the same name both times.
The number of times children reach reveals how many objects they think are in the box and allows us to see if they ae able to use two proper names to infer that there are two objects in the box, even though the objects are identical.