Compositionality in Chinese Characters: Evidence from English-speaking Children

Compositionality is a core property of language: the meaning of sentences is derived from the meanings of individual words and rules for combining their meanings (Partee, 1984). Human adults have been shown to make compositional generalizations across many domains such as language, visual concept learning, and sequence learning. Few studies have investigated conceptual compositionality in young children. In two experiments with English-speaking 5- to 8-year-old children who have not been exposed to Chinese characters, we found that after a brief training session, they were able to generalize the newly learned radical-meaning pairs to new characters compositionally. Our results suggest that by age 5, children can make meaningfully compositional generalizations.