Words (but Not Tones) Facilitate Object Categorization: Evidence from 6- and 12-month-olds

Overview

Journal Cognition

Publisher Elsevier

Specialty Psychology

Date 2006 Oct 27

PMID 17064677

Citations 87

Authors

Anne L Fulkerson

Sandra R Waxman

Affiliations

Soon will be listed here.

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.

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