Is there a “shape bias” for places?

Early emerging biases support our learning of new words, like a tendency to extend novel nouns to objects of the same shape. The present work reveals that, in its focus on the domain of objects, the existing literature on this shape bias has been critically limited in its generalizability. Adults (N=72) and 6-year-old children (N=72), but not 3-year-old children (N=72), extended novel nouns to places of the same shape over places composed of the same-colored walls, regardless of whether places were described by novel nouns in labeling phrases or place-relevant prepositional phrases. All age groups, by contrast, showed a shape bias for objects that matched many features of the place stimuli. This relatively delayed shape bias for places suggests that at least some word-learning biases may emerge separately for different domains, thereby challenging existing theories of language acquisition to account for such domain specificity in word learning.