Seeing Pink Elephants: Fourteen-Month-Olds' Interpretations of Novel Nouns and Adjectives

Waxman, Sandra R.; Booth, Amy E.

doi:10.1006/cogp.2001.0764

Cited by 198 publications

(223 citation statements)

References 39 publications

(51 reference statements)

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“…However, it was interesting that infants' performance did not differ as a function of their reported comprehension of "on." One reason for this finding may be that nearly all of the infants in each condition were reported to comprehend "on," such that there were an insufficient number of infants who did not understand the label to detect any difference between the two groups of infants.The present experiments add to a growing literature on the relation between cognitive development and early linguistic development (Balaban & Waxman, 1997;Gentner & Namy, 1999;Gopnik et al, 1996;Namy & Gentner, 2002;Waxman & Booth, 2001;Waxman & Hall, 1993;Waxman & Markow, 1995). The present results demonstrate that a specific label directs infants' attention not only to commonalities across objects and object properties (Balaban & Waxman, 1997;Booth & Waxman, 2002;Roberts & Jacob, 1991;Waxman & Booth, 2001) but also to commonalities in a spatial relation.…”

supporting

confidence: 72%

“…The present results demonstrate that a specific label directs infants' attention not only to commonalities across objects and object properties (Balaban & Waxman, 1997;Booth & Waxman, 2002;Roberts & Jacob, 1991;Waxman & Booth, 2001) but also to commonalities in a spatial relation. Hearing the word "on" presented with each example of support during habituation aided infants in attending to the support relation, a commonality that was not apparent to infants when viewing the events in silence.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 49%

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Can Language Do the Driving? The Effect of Linguistic Input on Infants' Categorization of Support Spatial Relations.

Casasola¹

2005

Developmental Psychology

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Two experiments explored the effect of linguistic input on 18-month-olds' ability to form an abstract categorical representation of support. Infants were habituated to 4 support events (i.e., one object placed on another) and were tested with a novel support and a novel containment event. Infants formed an abstract category of support (i.e., looked significantly longer at the novel than familiar relation) when hearing the word "on" during habituation but not when viewing the events in silence (Experiment 1) or when hearing general phrases or a novel word (Experiment 2). Results indicate that a familiar word can facilitate infants' formation of an abstract spatial category, leading them to form a category that they do not form in the absence of the word.On one side of the long-standing debate on the relation between thought and language has been the view that language can be a strong force in the development of particular concepts (Gopnik & Choi, 1995;Gopnik, Choi, & Baumberger, 1996;Vygotsky, 1962;Xu, 1999). This view has been particularly prominent in discussions of how children acquire the meanings expressed in relational terms, such as verbs and prepositions (Bowerman & Choi, 2001, with some researchers proposing that language may guide the development of relational concepts (e.g., Bowerman, 1996;Bowerman & Choi, 2001;Gentner & Boroditsky, 2001;Talmy, 1983). Language does guide how young children organize spatial events into language-specific semantic spatial categories (Choi & Bowerman, 1991), raising the question of whether experience with a particular spatial morpheme inspires children to form categories of spatial events that they may not otherwise form. However, a lack of experimental evidence has made the feasibility of this argument difficult to measure. Given that a specific word can facilitate infants' ability to form a category of objects (e.g., Balaban & Waxman, 1997;Waxman & Markow, 1995), it is possible that analogous results could be obtained with infants' ability to form an abstract categorical representation of a spatial relation. To explore this possibility, I examined the effect of linguistic input on infants' ability to form an abstract categorical representation of a spatial relation across two experiments.One reason that language is thought to shape the spatial categories that young children form is the myriad ways in which languages organize spatial events, such as placing a cup on the table or a picture on the wall, into the same or many different semantic categories (Bowerman, 1989(Bowerman, , 1996. Perhaps the most well-known example is the difference between English and Korean (Choi & Bowerman, 1991). English speakers linguistically divide events with containment and support relations into two distinct semantic categories: They label containment events as "in" and support events as "on." In contrast, Korean speakers Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Marianella Casasola, Department of Human Development, Cornell University, G38 MVR Hall, Ithaca, NY 1...

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supporting

confidence: 72%

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 49%

Can Language Do the Driving? The Effect of Linguistic Input on Infants' Categorization of Support Spatial Relations.

Casasola¹

2005

Developmental Psychology

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“…The present findings extend the developmental studies that demonstrated a structural relationship between children's induction and grammatical properties (Brown, 1957;Gelman, Hollander, Star, & Heyman, 2000;Markman & Hutchinson, 1984;Waxman & Booth, 2001). The present results indicate that the labeling effect reported in children (e.g., Gelman & Heyman, 1999) is not transient, and observable well beyond the developmental process specific to language acquisition.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 87%

Linking Syntax and Inductive Reasoning: Categorical Labeling and Generic Noun Phrases

Yamauchi

2008

PSYCHOLOGIA -An International Journal of Psychological Sciences

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When a person is characterized categorically with a noun label (e.g., Linda is a feminist), people tend to think that the attributes associated with that person are central and long-lasting (i.e., labeling effect). This bias, which is related to category-based induction and social misattributions such as stereotyping, has been known to occur because we associate the person with prototypical attributes represented in the category. One experiment described in this article indicates that the labeling effect can occur separately from the attributes represented in the category. The experiment suggests that labeling bolsters not only the perception of prototypical attributes but also the awareness of unrelated or even irrelevant attributes. The results from the experiments suggest that some generic information inherent in noun labels play a crucial role in category-based reasoning.

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“…However, in the second six months, "words begin to emerge from the melody" (Fernald, 1992, p. 403) as infants start to parse content words from the ongoing speech stream and to show a preference for content words over function words (Mandel-Emer, 1997;Shi & Werker, 2003). By their second year, infants show even greater differentiation as they begin to distinguish between more specific grammatical forms (such as nouns and adjectives) and link them to different kinds of meaning (object categories and object properties, respectively) Waxman & Booth, 2001.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Words (but not Tones) facilitate object categorization: Evidence from 6- and 12-month-olds

2007

Self Cite

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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. KeywordsInfancy; Categorization; Object Naming Questions concerning the relation between linguistic and conceptual organization have long occupied a central position in the cognitive sciences. Recently, considerable attention has been devoted to discovering the origin of this relation in infants and toddlers. Research in this arena has focused primarily on early word-learning. This is an apt focus because at its core, learning a word involves establishing a relation between a linguistic unit (the word) and a conceptual unit (the concept to which the word refers). The key developmental question is when words begin to carry conceptual force, and how early in the process of word-learning they begin to influence infants' representations of individual objects and the relations among them (Balaban

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Seeing Pink Elephants: Fourteen-Month-Olds' Interpretations of Novel Nouns and Adjectives

Cited by 198 publications

References 39 publications

Can Language Do the Driving? The Effect of Linguistic Input on Infants' Categorization of Support Spatial Relations.

Can Language Do the Driving? The Effect of Linguistic Input on Infants' Categorization of Support Spatial Relations.

Linking Syntax and Inductive Reasoning: Categorical Labeling and Generic Noun Phrases

Words (but not Tones) facilitate object categorization: Evidence from 6- and 12-month-olds

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