Abstract
Recent studies reveal that naming has powerful conceptual consequences within the first year of life. Naming distinct objects with the same word highlights commonalities among the objects and promotes object categorization. In the present experiment, we pursued the origin of this link by examining the influence of words and tones on object categorization in infants at 6 and 12 months. At both ages, infants hearing a novel word for a set of distinct objects successfully formed object categories; those hearing a sequence of tones for the same objects did not. These results support the view that infants are sensitive to powerful and increasingly nuanced links between linguistic and conceptual units very early in the process of lexical acquisition.
Original language | English (US) |
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Pages (from-to) | 218-228 |
Number of pages | 11 |
Journal | Cognition |
Volume | 105 |
Issue number | 1 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - Oct 2007 |
Keywords
- Categorization
- Infancy
- Object naming
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Experimental and Cognitive Psychology
- Language and Linguistics
- Developmental and Educational Psychology
- Linguistics and Language
- Cognitive Neuroscience