Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Deictic time words (e.g., “tomorrow,” “yesterday”) refer totime periods relative to the present moment. While childrenproduce these words by age 2-3, they use them incorrectly forseveral more years. Here, as a case study in abstract wordlearning, we explored what children know about these wordsduring this delay. Specifically, we probed children’sknowledge of three aspects of meaning: deictic (past/future)status, sequential ordering (e.g., “tomorrow” is after“yesterday”), and remoteness from now. We asked 3- to 8-year-olds to place these words on a timeline extending fromthe past (left) to the future (right). Even 4-year-olds couldmeaningfully represent the words’ deictic status and order,and by 6, the majority displayed adult-like performance.Adult-like knowledge of remoteness, however, emergedindependently, after age 7. Thus, even while children usethese terms incorrectly, they are gradually constructing astructured semantic domain, including information about thedeictic, sequential, and metric relations among terms.