The ability to compare plays a key role in how humans learn, but words that describe relations between objects, like comparisons, are difficult to learn. We examined how children learn size comparison words, and how their interpretations of these change across development. One‐hundred‐and‐forty children in England (36–107 months; 68 girls; majority White) were asked to build block structures that were bigger, longer, smaller, shorter, or taller than an experimenter's. Children were most successful with words that refer to size increases. Younger children were less accurate with smaller and shorter, often building bigger structures. The dimensional aspect of taller emerged gradually. These findings suggest that children's interpretation of the meaning of size comparison words changes and becomes more precise across development.

中文翻译：

---

更大与更小：儿童对尺码比较词的理解随着年龄的增长而变得更加精确


比较能力在人类的学习方式中起着关键作用，但描述对象之间关系的单词（如比较）很难学习。我们研究了儿童如何学习大小比较词，以及他们对这些词的解释如何随着发展而变化。英格兰的 140 名儿童（36-107 个月;68 名女孩;大多数是白人）被要求建造比实验者更大、更长、更小、更短或更高的块状结构。儿童最成功的是提到体型增加的词。年幼的孩子对更小和更矮的准确率较低，通常会建造更大的结构。taller 的维度方面逐渐出现。这些发现表明，儿童对大小比较词含义的解释在整个发育过程中会发生变化并变得更加精确。