How do toddlers learn the names of geometric forms? Previous work suggests that preschoolers have fragmentary knowledge and that defining properties are not understood until well into elementary school. The current study investigated when children first begin to understand shape names and how they apply those labels to unusual instances. We tested 25- and 30-month-old children’s (N = 30 each) understanding of names for canonical shapes (commonly encountered instances, e.g., equilateral triangles), noncanonical shapes (more irregular instances, e.g., scalene triangles), and embedded shapes (shapes within a larger picture, e.g., triangular slices of pizza). At 25 months, children knew very few names, including those for canonical shapes. By 30 months, however, children had acquired more shape names and were beginning to apply them to some of the less typical instances of the shapes. Possible mechanisms driving this initial development of shape knowledge and implications of that development for school readiness are explored.

中文翻译：

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事物的形状：幼儿认识几何形式的名称和性质的起源

幼儿如何学习几何形状的名称？以前的工作表明，学龄前儿童的知识是零散的，直到小学阶段才理解定义的属性。当前的研究调查了儿童何时开始理解形状名称以及他们如何将这些标签应用于不寻常的实例。我们测试了 25 个月和 30 个月大的儿童（每人 N = 30）对规范形状（常见实例，例如等边三角形）、非规范形状（更不规则的实例，例如不等边三角形）和嵌入形状名称的理解（较大图片中的形状，例如三角形披萨片）。在 25 个月大时，孩子们知道的名字很少，包括规范形状的名字。然而到了 30 个月，孩子们获得了更多的形状名称，并开始将它们应用于一些不太典型的形状实例。探索了推动形状知识初步发展的可能机制以及这种发展对入学准备的影响。