TY - JOUR
T1 - What the [beep]? Six-month-olds link novel communicative signals to meaning
AU - Ferguson, Brock
AU - Waxman, Sandra R.
N1 - Funding Information:
This research was supported by a Cognitive Science Society in Berlin and the 38th Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development. Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Doctoral Fellowship awarded to B.F. and a National Science Foundation grant ( BCS-1023300 ) to S.R.W. We gratefully acknowledge the infants and parents who participated in these experiments. We also thank Sheena Desai and Tracy Smith for acting in the vignettes, Ilana Clift and Jane Hohman for data collection, and Jacob Dink for comments on a previous version of this manuscript. Portions of these data were presented at the 35th Annual Meeting of the
Publisher Copyright:
© 2015 Elsevier B.V.
PY - 2016/1/1
Y1 - 2016/1/1
N2 - Over the first year, infants tune into the signals of their native language and begin to link them to meaning. Here, we ask whether infants, like adults, can also infer the communicative function of otherwise arbitrary signals (here, tone sequences) and link these to meaning as well. We examined 6-month-olds' object categorization in the context of sine-wave tones, a signal that fails to support categorization at any point during their first year. However, before the categorization task, we exposed infants to tones in one of two vignettes. In one, the tones were produced by an actor in a rich communicative exchange; in the other, infants heard the very same tones, but these were uncoupled from the actors' activity. Infants exposed to the communicative vignette successfully formed object categories in the subsequent test; those exposed to the non-communicative vignette failed, performing identically to infants with no prior exposure to this novel signal. This reveals in 6-month-old infants a remarkable flexibility in identifying which signals in the ambient environment are communicative and in linking these signals to core cognitive capacities including categorization.
AB - Over the first year, infants tune into the signals of their native language and begin to link them to meaning. Here, we ask whether infants, like adults, can also infer the communicative function of otherwise arbitrary signals (here, tone sequences) and link these to meaning as well. We examined 6-month-olds' object categorization in the context of sine-wave tones, a signal that fails to support categorization at any point during their first year. However, before the categorization task, we exposed infants to tones in one of two vignettes. In one, the tones were produced by an actor in a rich communicative exchange; in the other, infants heard the very same tones, but these were uncoupled from the actors' activity. Infants exposed to the communicative vignette successfully formed object categories in the subsequent test; those exposed to the non-communicative vignette failed, performing identically to infants with no prior exposure to this novel signal. This reveals in 6-month-old infants a remarkable flexibility in identifying which signals in the ambient environment are communicative and in linking these signals to core cognitive capacities including categorization.
KW - Categorization
KW - Communication
KW - Infants
KW - Language
KW - Social cognition
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U2 - 10.1016/j.cognition.2015.09.020
DO - 10.1016/j.cognition.2015.09.020
M3 - Article
C2 - 26433024
AN - SCOPUS:84943154657
SN - 0010-0277
VL - 146
SP - 185
EP - 189
JO - Cognition
JF - Cognition
ER -