These biases are important for children with limited processing abilities if they are to be successful in word learning.
Her studies suggest that even in cases where color or a dynamic activity is made salient to children, they will still interpret the new word as a label for whole objects.
[clarification needed] One criticism of the whole object assumption is that much of the evidence provided is only for children 18 months and older.
[8] A more recent study strengthened the breadth of ages and stimuli conditions under which this bias occurs.
[6][clarification needed] Another criticism is the claim that a limited set of stimuli has been used that possibly favors a "whole" interpretation.
These findings support the hypothesis that there is a tendency to encode the overall shape of the stimuli in working memory, rather than individual details.
Children are draw from a wide variety of characteristics to make inferences, although shape is typically the most prevalent.
[11] An example of categorical scope and perceptual similarity can be illustrated when children learn animal names.
However, Nelson (1988) argues against the taxonomic assumption because children aren't responding to tests 100% accurately 100% of the time.
[13] The concept of have perfect accuracy every time with every participant isn't something found in most research, but Nelson claims this assumption might not be biological.
Premack found similar results of what studies using children found—chimpanzees learning language used the taxonomic assumption.
Markman and Wachtel's 1988 studies demonstrated the learning process through the whole-object and mutual exclusivity assumption.
Upholding the mutual exclusivity assumption children pointed to the intended part more often in the familiar object condition.
[20] Markman and Wachtel (1988) hypothesize that children preference the taxonomic constraint when it interferes with the mutual exclusivity assumption.
The noun-category bias suggests that children learn nouns more quickly than any other syntactic category.
Preschool-age children have been found to be inclined to interpret words from just one linguistic category- nouns.
The noun-category bias places regulations on the possible interpretations that a child might attach to a newly encountered noun.
Experiments from Waxman and Gelman [24] as well as Markman and Hutchinson [25] provide results which support the claim that children show preference for categorical relations over random hypothesizing when learning new nouns.
This suggests a correlation between language and thought and provides evidence for the theory that syntax and semantics are related.
[27] Research has found that a noun bias exists in at least English, French, Dutch, German, Spanish, Hebrew, and Japanese.
However, conflicting data from Korean, Mandarin, and Turkish leads researchers to believe that the noun-category bias may be language dependent.
This stems from the idea that children are associative learners that have abstract category knowledge at many different levels.
The juxtaposition to this is that children refer to kinds of objects which share unforeseen properties and perceptual features.
Their research found that children were less likely to extend a shape bias when other alternative methods of categorization were offered.
However, Smith and Samuelson [30] argue that Cimpian and Markman tested only already known lexical categories which negates the effects of simulating word learning.
they argue that the shape bias is not to be considered as the exclusive tool used in word learning, only that it aids the process.