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

Abstract

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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