Labelling patterns and object naming

Cognition, 2016

A growing body of evidence documents that naming guides 9-month-old infants as they organize their visual experiences into categories. In particular, this evidence reveals that naming highlights categories when these are visually distinct. Here we advance this work in by introducing an anticipatory looking design to assess how naming influences infants' categorization of objects that vary along a perceptual continuum. We introduced 9-month-old infants (n = 48) to continua of novel creature-like objects. During the learning phase, infants had an opportunity to observe that objects from one end of the perceptual continuum moved to the left and objects from the other end moved to the right. What varied was how the objects were named. Infants in theone-name condition heard the same novel noun applied to all objects along the continuum; those in the two-name condition heard one name for objects from one end of the continuum and a second name for objects at the other end. At test, all...

Proceedings of the 24th Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development, 2000

Young word learners seem to know a lot about how nouns map to different kinds of categories. They generalize names for objects they know to new objects in a consistent and seemingly sensible manner according to the kind of object being named. One task that has demonstrated this is the novel noun generalization task. In this task, children are shown an exemplar, it is named, and then the children are asked what other things are called by the same name. Young children extend the name of a solid object to other objects that match ...

2021

Supplemental material, sj-pdf-1-pss-10.1177_0956797621993107 for Beyond the Shape of Things: Infants Can Be Taught to Generalize Nouns by Objects' Functions by Cecilia Zuniga-Montanez, Sotaro Kita, Suzanne Aussems and Andrea Krott in Psychological Science

Language Learning and Development, 2012

Although there is considerable evidence that nouns highlight category-based commonalities, including both those that are perceptually available and those that reflect underlying conceptual similarity, some have claimed that words function merely as features of objects. Here, we directly test these alternative accounts. Four-year-olds (n = 140) were introduced to two different novel animals that were highlighted with nouns, adjectives, or stickers. Children heard a nonobvious novel property applied to the first animal and were asked whether this property applied to other animals that filled the similarity space between the original two animals. When the two animals were named with the same noun, children extended the property broadly throughout the similarity space. When the animals were marked with adjectives or stickers, children adopted a similarity-based pattern. These findings demonstrate clearly that nouns exert a unique effect on categorization-they promote category formation and engage conceptual reasoning beyond perceptual similarity alone.

… of the 30th …, 2006

The infant's environment is filled with objects. If each were treated as unique, this complexity would quickly become overwhelming. Therefore, the task for the young infant is to construct categories that capture similarities among objects and to learn words that express these categories. ...

2007

Perhaps more than any other developmental achievement, word-learning stands at the very intersection of language and cognition. Early word-learning represents infants' entrance into a truly symbolic system and brings with it a means to establish reference. To succeed, infants must identify the relevant linguistic units, identify their corresponding concepts, and establish a mapping between the two. But how do infants begin to map words to concepts, and thus establish their meaning? How do they discover that different types of words (e.g., "dog" (noun), "fluffy" (adjective), "begging" (verb) refer to different aspects of the same scene (e.g, a standard poodle, seated on its hind legs and holding its front paws in the air)? We have proposed that infants begin the task of word-learning with a broad, universal expectation linking novel words to a broad range of commonalities, and that this initial expectation is subsequently fine-tuned on the basis of their experience with the objects and events they encounter and the native language under acquisition. In this chapter, we examine this proposal, in light of recent evidence with infants and young children. Introduction Infants across the world's communities are exposed to vastly different experiences. Consider, for example, one infant being raised in a remote region of the Guatemalan rainforest, another growing up in the mountains of rural Switzerland, and a third being raised in Brooklyn, NY. Each infant will live in a world that is unimaginable to the other, surrounded by objects and events that are foreign to the other, and immersed in a language that the other cannot begin to understand. Yet despite these vast Early word learning 2 differences in experience, infants across the world display striking similarities in the most fundamental aspects of their conceptual and language development. Within the first year of life, each of these infants will begin to establish systematic links between words and the concepts to which they refer. On the conceptual side, they will begin to form categories of objects that capture both the similarities and differences among the objects they encounter. Most of these early object categories will be at the basic level (i.e., dog) and the more inclusive global level (i.e., animal). Infants will begin to use these early object categories as an inductive base to support inferences about new objects that they encounter. They will also begin to relate categories to one another, implicitly, on the basis of taxonomic (e.g., dogs are a kind of animal), thematic (e.g., dogs chase tennis balls), functional (e.g., dogs can pull children on sleds) and other relations. Infants' early object and event categories will provide a core of conceptual continuity from infancy through adulthood. Concurrent with these conceptual advances, infants in each community will make remarkably rapid strides in language acquisition. Even before they begin to understand the words of their native language, infants show a special interest in the sounds of language. Newborns respond to the emotional tone carried by the melody of human speech (Fernald, 1992a, b), and prefer speech sounds to other

Developmental Psychology, 1995

If young children approached the task of word learning with a specific hypothesis about the meaning of novel count nouns, they could make the problem of word learning more tractable. Six experiments were conducted to test children's hypotheses about how labels map to object categories. Findings indicated that (a) 3-and 4-year-olds function with an antithematic bias; (b) children do not reliably extend novel nouns to superordinate exemplars when perceptual similarity is controlled until approximately age 7; and (c) children expect novel nouns to label taxonomic categories at the basic level, even in the presence of a perceptually compelling distractor. Results are interpreted as supporting the principle of categorical scope (R. M. Golinkoff, C. B. Mervis, & K. Hirsh-Pasek, 1994).

Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 2012

Linguistic labels affect inductive generalization; however, the mechanism underlying these effects remains unclear. According to one similarity-based model, SINC (similarity, induction, naming, and categorization), early in development labels are features of objects contributing to the overall similarity of compared entities, with early induction being similarity based. If this is the case, then not only identical but also phonologically similar labels may contribute to the overall similarity and thus to induction. These predictions were tested in a series of experiments with 5-year-olds and adults. In Experiments 1-5 participants performed a label extension task, whereas in Experiment 6 they performed a feature induction task. Results indicate that phonological similarity contributes to early induction and support the notion that for young children labels are features of objects.

Frontiers in Psychology, 2012

Two of the most formidable skills that characterize human beings are language and our prowess in visual object recognition. They may also be developmentally intertwined. Two experiments, a large sample cross-sectional study and a smaller sample 6-month longitudinal study of 18-to 24-month-olds, tested a hypothesized developmental link between changes in visual object representation and noun learning. Previous findings in visual object recognition indicate that children's ability to recognize common basic level categories from sparse structural shape representations of object shape emerges between the ages of 18 and 24 months, is related to noun vocabulary size, and is lacking in children with language delay. Other research shows in artificial noun learning tasks that during this same developmental period, young children systematically generalize object names by shape, that this shape bias predicts future noun learning, and is lacking in children with language delay. The two experiments examine the developmental relation between visual object recognition and the shape bias for the first time. The results show that developmental changes in visual object recognition systematically precede the emergence of the shape bias. The results suggest a developmental pathway in which early changes in visual object recognition that are themselves linked to category learning enable the discovery of higher-order regularities in category structure and thus the shape bias in novel noun learning tasks. The proposed developmental pathway has implications for understanding the role of specific experience in the development of both visual object recognition and the shape bias in early noun learning.

Developmental Psychology, 2002

Can object names and functions act as cues to categories for infants? In Study 1, 14-and 18-month-old infants were shown novel category exemplars along with a function, a name, or no cues. Infants were then asked to "find another one," choosing between 2 novel objects (1 from the familiar category and the other not). Infants at both ages were more likely to select the category match in the function than in the no-cue condition. However, only at 18 months did naming the objects enhance categorization. Study 2 shows that names can facilitate categorization for 14-month-olds as well when a hint regarding the core meaning of the objects (the function of a single familiarization object) is provided.