Whereas young children accept words that differ by only a single phoneme as equivalent labels for novel objects, older children do not (J. F. Werker, C. J. Fennell, K. M. Corcoran, & C. L. Stager, 2002). In these experiments, 106 children were exposed to a training regime that has previously been found to facilitate children's use of phonemic contrasts (E. D. Thiessen, 2007). The results indicate that the effect of this training is limited to contexts that are highly similar to children's initial experience with the phonemic contrast, suggesting that early word-form representations are not composed of entirely abstract units such as phonemes or features. Instead, these results are consistent with theories suggesting that children's early word-form representations retain contextual and perceptual features associated with children's prior experience with words.
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.
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