Medical X-Press – Liz Fuller-Wright 
Even young children know what typical dogs and fish look like—and they apply that knowledge when they hear new words, reports a team from the Princeton Baby Lab, where researchers study how babies learn to see, talk and understand the world. In a series of experiments with children 3 to 5 years old, the researchers found that when children are learning new nouns, they use what they know about these objects—how typical or unusual they are for their categories (such as fish, dog, bird or flower)—to help them figure out what these words mean. This type of sophisticated reasoning was thought to only develop later. The researchers’ work appears in the current issue of the Journal of Child Language. (more)