Why your toddler calls all men 'Daddy' (for a little while)

Have you ever been in this situation? You're out in public and your toddler points at a stranger and yells 'Daddy!' You feel mortified and playfully say 'Oh, that's not Daddy!' and wonder how they could possibly think that a strange man was Daddy? This is a normal part of language development and it is what we refer to as overextensions.

Overextensions occur when a word is used to refer to things beyond their intended meaning. So 'Daddy' is used to refer to all men or 'puppy' is used to refer to all four-legged animals. There is some debate amongst researchers as to why these overextensions occur. Some evidence points to incomplete word meanings, meaning that toddlers are still learning about features unique to certain people, places and things, so a default like 'Daddy' is used while this is all being fine-tuned. Other researchers, however, have suggested that it is a word access issue. So while trying to retrieve the correct word, the incorrect word is accessed and used. Whatever the case, these overextensions tend to decline as vocabularies get bigger (Rescorla, 1980).

What happens, however, when toddlers are much more restrictive in their word use? For instance, they refer to a golden retriever as 'puppy' but not a poodle, Dalmatian or Weiner dog? This error is an example of an underextension, another normal (though less common) error where words are used more selectively while the child's vocabulary is under construction.

So what can be done? I always recommend that parents and caregivers use a strategy called "corrected feedback". This simply means that you model the correct word back without requiring that the toddler repeat after you. It looks like this:

Child: "Puppy!"

Adult: "Kitty cat! You see a kitty cat!"

Child: "Daddy!"

Adult: "Do you see a man? That's a man."

In these examples, the adult is providing the correct word with no pressure. As the child learns more words, they will rely less and less on strategies like extensions to communicate meaning.

-- Meg

References:

Rescorla, L. A. (1980). Overextension in early language development. Journal of Child Language, 7(2), 321–335. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0305000900002658