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) |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 218-228 |
| Number of pages | 11 |
| Journal | Cognition |
| Volume | 105 |
| Issue number | 1 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Oct 2007 |
Funding
This work was supported by NIH Grant #HD045296 to Anne Fulkerson and NIH Grant #HD030410 to Sandra Waxman. We are indebted to the infants and parents who generously volunteered their participation, as well as to Jennifer Seymour, Kristin Szymanowski, and Julie Hupp for their assistance with data collection. We thank Jeff Lidz, Thomas Piccin, Erin Leddon, and Robert Haaf for their comments on previous drafts of this manuscript.
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