Two-Year-Oldsʼ Appreciation of the Shared Nature of Novel Object Labels (original) (raw)
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Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology / Revue canadienne de psychologie expérimentale, 1998
The aim of this research-was to examine whether infants at the early stages of lexical development were sensitive to the word-category linkage. In Experiment 1,16-to 19-month-old infants were requested to match a target with either a basic-level or a thematic match, with or without a novel label. Stimuli were presented using the preferential looking paradigm. Infants in the Novel Label condition looked significantly longer at the basic-level match than infants in the No Label condition. In Experiment 2, infants •were presented with a target, followed by a basic-level match and a superordinate-level match with or without a novel label. Again, infants in the Novel Label condition looked significandy longer at the basic-level match than infants in the No Label condition. Taken together, these findings indicate that infants initially assume that novel words label basic-level categories and thereby do honour die word-category linkage.
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The current research investigates infants' perception of a novel object from a category that is familiar to young infants: key rings. We ask whether experiences obtained outside the lab would allow young infants to parse the visible portions of a partly occluded key ring display into one single unit, presumably as a result of having categorized it as a key ring. This categorization was marked by infants' perception of the keys and ring as a single unit that should move together, despite their attribute differences.
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The effects of differing levels of word knowledge on infants' sequential touching behaviors were investigated in two studies. In both, parent report was used to assess three levels of word knowledge: known, frontier, and unknown. In the first study, 14-month-old infants sequentially touched objects consistent with parents' reports of their word knowledge. In the second study, 20-month-old infants sequentially touched objects by both conceptual category and reported level of word knowledge. It appears that even infants, like adults, can make distinctions among objects on the basis of their knowledge about the objects' labels. partial knowledge word meanings sequential touching infancy