Toddlers' Language-Mediated Visual Search: They Need not have the Words for It

Abstract

Eye movements made by listeners during language-mediated visual search reveal a strong link between visual processing and conceptual processing. For example, upon hearing the word for a missing referent with a characteristic colour (e.g., “strawberry”), listeners tend to fixate a colour-matched distractor (e.g., a red plane) more than a colour-mismatched distractor (e.g., a yellow plane). We ask whether these shifts in visual attention are mediated by the retrieval of lexically stored colour labels. Do children who do not yet possess verbal labels for the colour attribute that spoken and viewed objects have in common exhibit language-mediated eye movements like those made by older children and adults? That is, do toddlers look at a red plane when hearing “strawberry”? We observed that 24-month-olds lacking colour term knowledge nonetheless recognized the perceptual–conceptual commonality between named and seen objects. This indicates that language-mediated visual search need not depend on stored labels for concepts.

Toddlers Activate Lexical Semantic Knowledge in the Absence of Visual Referents: Evidence from Auditory Priming

“…In their studies using the IPL method, Styles and Plunkett () found a priming effect in 24‐month‐olds but not 18‐month‐olds, and Arias‐Trejo and Plunkett () found a priming effect in 21‐month‐olds but not in 18‐month‐olds. Other research has found that 24‐month‐olds activate properties (such as color) or a word's meaning when they hear that word (Johnson, McQueen, & Huettig, ; Swingley & Fernald, ). Because of the novelty of our method, and especially due to the removal of all contextual cues to a word's meaning, we studied 24‐month‐olds in order to ensure that participants had the requisite knowledge for the task.…”

Biological origins of color categorization

“…One important question for further research is how we transition from a prelinguistic color categorization based largely on biological mechanisms to a lexical color categorization that may make additional or fewer distinctions. The lack of one-to-one mapping between prelinguistic and lexical color categorization may well partly explain the difficulty that children have in learning the words for colors (49)(50)(51)(52). Further research should also examine whether the distinctions in infant color memory are universal across different cultures and environments.…”

Infants Use Category Label Knowledge to Interpret Absent Reference

“…Previous research on infants’ lexical development suggests that infants’ lexicons are organized in a network with groupings based on taxonomic, perceptual, functional, and associational relationships from as early as 14 months (Friedrich & Friederici, ) and continue to develop into the second year of life (Arias‐Trejo & Plunkett, , , ; Johnson & Huettig, ; Johnson, McQueen, & Huettig, ; Mani, Johnson, McQueen, & Huettig, ; Styles & Plunkett, ). Such clustering characterizes adult lexicons and may be considered a proper developmental achievement.…”

“…Johnson et al. () also clarified with 2‐year‐old participants that color label comprehension is not required for this effect. On the other hand, in a similar experiment (Huettig & Altmann, ), adult participants were more likely to fixate on color‐associated distracters than at other distracters only when the pictures were presented in color.…”

“…This conclusion was also reached in priming–interference studies. For example, in Styles and Plunkett () 24‐month‐old toddlers’ target recognition was more robust after hearing a semantically related word (e.g., cat–dog) than after hearing an unrelated word (plate–dog; see also Arias‐Trejo & Plunkett, ; Johnson et al., ). Preferential listening studies also showed that 24‐month‐old toddlers are sensitive to the semantic (and visual) relatedness of referents in the absence of visual input (Willits, Wojcik, Seidenberg, & Saffran, ; Wojcik & Saffran, ).…”