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ToolsPomiechowska, Barbara and Gliga, Teodora (2019) Lexical acquisition through category matching: 12-month-old infants associate words to visual categories. Psychological Science, 30 (2). pp. 288-299. ISSN 0956-7976
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Abstract
Although it is widely recognized that human infants build a sizeable conceptual repertoire before mastering language, it remains a matter of debate whether and to what extent early conceptual and category knowledge contributes to language development. We addressed this question by investigating whether 12-month-olds used preverbal categories to discover the meanings of new words. We showed that one group of infants (n = 18) readily extended novel labels to previously unseen exemplars of preverbal visual categories after only a single labeling episode, but two other groups struggled to do so when taught labels for unfamiliar categories (those who had been previously exposed, n = 18, or not exposed, n = 18, to category tokens). These results suggest that infants expect labels to denote categories of objects and are equipped with learning mechanisms responsible for matching prelinguistic knowledge structures with linguistic inputs. This ability is consistent with the idea that our conceptual machinery provides building blocks for vocabulary and language acquisition.
| Item Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Uncontrolled Keywords: | categorization,cognitive development,infancy,open data,open materials,word extension,word learning,psychology(all) ,/dk/atira/pure/subjectarea/asjc/3200 |
| Faculty \ School: | Faculty of Social Sciences > School of Psychology |
| UEA Research Groups: | Faculty of Social Sciences > Research Groups > Developmental Science |
| Related URLs: | |
| Depositing User: | LivePure Connector |
| Date Deposited: | 15 Aug 2018 11:31 |
| Last Modified: | 30 Jun 2025 00:30 |
| URI: | https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/68042 |
| DOI: | 10.1177/0956797618817506 |
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