Final published version
Licence: CC BY: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
Research output: Contribution to Journal/Magazine › Journal article › peer-review
Research output: Contribution to Journal/Magazine › Journal article › peer-review
}
TY - JOUR
T1 - Infants’ conceptual representations of meaningful verbal and nonverbal sounds
AU - Sirri, L.
AU - Guerra, E.
AU - Linnert, S.
AU - Smith, E.S.
AU - Reid, V.
AU - Parise, E.
PY - 2020/6/8
Y1 - 2020/6/8
N2 - In adults, words are more effective than sounds at activating conceptual representations. We aimed to replicate these findings and extend them to infants. In a series of experiments using an eye tracker object recognition task, suitable for both adults and infants, participants heard either a word (e.g. cow) or an associated sound (e.g. mooing) followed by an image illustrating a target (e.g. cow) and a distracter (e.g. telephone). The results showed that adults reacted faster when the visual object matched the auditory stimulus and even faster in the word relative to the associated sound condition. Infants, however, did not show a similar pattern of eye-movements: only eighteen-month-olds, but not 9- or 12-month-olds, were equally fast at recognizing the target object in both conditions. Looking times, however, were longer for associated sounds, suggesting that processing sounds elicits greater allocation of attention. Our findings suggest that the advantage of words over associated sounds in activating conceptual representations emerges at a later stage during language development.
AB - In adults, words are more effective than sounds at activating conceptual representations. We aimed to replicate these findings and extend them to infants. In a series of experiments using an eye tracker object recognition task, suitable for both adults and infants, participants heard either a word (e.g. cow) or an associated sound (e.g. mooing) followed by an image illustrating a target (e.g. cow) and a distracter (e.g. telephone). The results showed that adults reacted faster when the visual object matched the auditory stimulus and even faster in the word relative to the associated sound condition. Infants, however, did not show a similar pattern of eye-movements: only eighteen-month-olds, but not 9- or 12-month-olds, were equally fast at recognizing the target object in both conditions. Looking times, however, were longer for associated sounds, suggesting that processing sounds elicits greater allocation of attention. Our findings suggest that the advantage of words over associated sounds in activating conceptual representations emerges at a later stage during language development.
KW - adult
KW - age
KW - Article
KW - attention
KW - auditory stimulation
KW - child
KW - concept formation
KW - controlled study
KW - eye movement
KW - eye tracker object recognition task
KW - female
KW - hearing
KW - human
KW - human experiment
KW - infant
KW - language development
KW - male
KW - normal human
KW - novel object recognition test
KW - sound
KW - visual stimulation
KW - voice
KW - young adult
U2 - 10.1371/journal.pone.0233968
DO - 10.1371/journal.pone.0233968
M3 - Journal article
C2 - 32512583
VL - 15
JO - PLoS ONE
JF - PLoS ONE
SN - 1932-6203
IS - 6
M1 - e0233968
ER -