TY - JOUR

T1 - Learned labels shape pre-speech infants’ object representations

AU - Twomey, Katherine Elizabeth

AU - Westermann, Gert

PY - 2018/1/31

Y1 - 2018/1/31

N2 - Infants rapidly learn both linguistic and nonlinguistic representations of their environment and begin to link these from around 6 months. While there is an increasing body of evidence for the effect of labels heard in-task on infants' online processing, whether infants' learned linguistic representations shape learned nonlinguistic representations is unclear. In this study 10-month-old infants were trained over the course of a week with two 3D objects, one labeled, and one unlabeled. Infants then took part in a looking time task in which 2D images of the objects were presented individually in a silent familiarization phase, followed by a preferential looking trial. During the critical familiarization phase, infants looked for longer at the previously labeled stimulus than the unlabeled stimulus, suggesting that learning a label for an object had shaped infants' representations as indexed by looking times. We interpret these results in terms of label activation and novelty response accounts and discuss implications for our understanding of early representational development.

AB - Infants rapidly learn both linguistic and nonlinguistic representations of their environment and begin to link these from around 6 months. While there is an increasing body of evidence for the effect of labels heard in-task on infants' online processing, whether infants' learned linguistic representations shape learned nonlinguistic representations is unclear. In this study 10-month-old infants were trained over the course of a week with two 3D objects, one labeled, and one unlabeled. Infants then took part in a looking time task in which 2D images of the objects were presented individually in a silent familiarization phase, followed by a preferential looking trial. During the critical familiarization phase, infants looked for longer at the previously labeled stimulus than the unlabeled stimulus, suggesting that learning a label for an object had shaped infants' representations as indexed by looking times. We interpret these results in terms of label activation and novelty response accounts and discuss implications for our understanding of early representational development.

KW - cognitive development

KW - word learning

KW - representational development

KW - developmental psychology

U2 - 10.1111/infa.12201

DO - 10.1111/infa.12201

M3 - Journal article

C2 - 30450015

VL - 23

SP - 61

EP - 73

JO - Infancy

JF - Infancy

SN - 1525-0008

IS - 1

ER -