The Development of a Linkage between Count Nouns and Object Categories: Evidence from Fifteen- to Twenty-One-Month-Old Infants

Waxman, Sandra R.; Hall, D. Geoffrey

doi:10.2307/1131336

Cited by 113 publications

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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.…”

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confidence: 72%

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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confidence: 72%

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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“…In a no-word condition (similar to the one in Waxman and Hall (1993)), we applied Gaussian Mixture Models to cluster visual features. The clustering results were used as distinct object categories and directly associated with words.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The emergence of links between lexical acquisition and object categorization: a computational study

2005

Connection Science

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Language is about symbols, and those symbols must be grounded in the physical world. Children learn to associate language with sensorimotor experiences during their development. In light of this, we first provide a computational account of how words are mapped to their perceptually grounded meanings. Moreover, the main part of this work proposes and implements a computational model of how word learning influences the formation of object categories to which those words refer. This model simulates the bi-directional relationship between word and object category learning: (1) object categorization provides mental representations of meanings that are mapped to words to form lexical items; (2) linguistic labels help object categorization by providing additional teaching signals; and (3) these two learning processes interplay with each other and form a developmental feedback loop. Compared with the method that performs these two tasks separately, our model shows promising improvements in both word-to-world mapping and perceptual categorization, suggesting a unified view of lexical and category learning in an integrative framework. Most importantly, this work provides a cognitively plausible explanation of the mechanistic nature of early word learning and object learning from co-occurring multisensory data.

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“…Waxman and Hall (1993) showed that linguistic labels may facilitate the formation of a category by infants at 16 to 21 months of age. Because adults create features to subserve the representations and categorizations of objects (Schyns, Goldstone, & Thibaut, 1998), the formation of categories in the presence of auditory input is possibly based on the similarities of perceptual features and linguistic labels.…”

Section: Perceptually Grounded Word Meaningsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Role of Embodied Intention in Early Lexical Acquisition

2005

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We examine the influence of inferring interlocutors' referential intentions from their body movements at the early stage of lexical acquisition. By testing human participants and comparing their performances in different learning conditions, we find that those embodied intentions facilitate both word discovery and word-meaning association. In light of empirical findings, the main part of this article presents a computational model that can identify the sound patterns of individual words from continuous speech, using nonlinguistic contextual information, and employ body movements as deictic references to discover word-meaning associations. To our knowledge, this work is the first model of word learning that not only learns lexical items from raw multisensory signals to closely resemble infant language development from natural environments, but also explores the computational role of social cognitive skills in lexical acquisition.

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The Development of a Linkage between Count Nouns and Object Categories: Evidence from Fifteen- to Twenty-One-Month-Old Infants

Cited by 113 publications

References 0 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.

The emergence of links between lexical acquisition and object categorization: a computational study

The Role of Embodied Intention in Early Lexical Acquisition

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