Labels constructively shape object categories in 10-month-old infants

Abstract

How do infants' emerging language abilities affect their organization of objects into categories? The question of whether labels can shape the early perceptual categories formed by young infants has received considerable attention, but evidence has remained inconclusive. Here, 10-month-old infants (N = 80) were familiarized with a series of morphed stimuli along a continuum that can be seen as either one category or two categories. Infants formed one category when the stimuli were presented in silence or paired with the same label, but they divided the stimulus set into two categories when half of the stimuli were paired with one label and half with another label. Pairing the stimuli with two different nonlinguistic sounds did not lead to the same result. In this case, infants showed evidence for the formation of a single category, indicating that nonlinguistic sounds do not cause infants to divide a category. These results suggest that labels and visual perceptual information interact in category formation, with labels having the potential to constructively shape category structures already in preverbal infants, and that nonlinguistic sounds do not have the same effect

Naming influences 9-month-olds’ identification of discrete categories along a perceptual continuum

“…This provides assurances that Set 1 and Set 2 were comparable in their perceptual variabilty, and that in both sets, the test objects closer to the poles were indeed more different than those near the center. In addition, this index reveals that our continua were perceptually tighter than those in Althaus and Westermann (2016)’ study 1 , suggesting that they were likely more difficult to split into two subcategories.…”

“…This reveals that even before infants begin to produce words on their own, naming serves as a strong supervisory signal for category learning, supporting infants as they impose boundaries along a continuum and highlighting the categories’ joints. This new evidence, coupled with evidence from older children (Althaus & Westermann, 2016; Graham, Booth, & Waxman, 2012; Graham, Kilbreath, & Welder, 2004; Johanson & Papafragou, 2011; Landau & Shipley, 2001), suggests that there is considerable developmental continuity in the effects of naming from infancy.…”

“…More recently, Althaus and Westermann (2016) sought to examine this naming effect in younger infants. Like Landau and Shipley, the authors morphed two distinctly different novel objects (Standard A and Standard B) to create a continuum.…”

“…To do so, we move beyond the novelty preference design to trace the role of naming on infants’ categorization of objects along a perceptual continuum. We focus on 9-month-old infants because although they do not yet produce category names on their own, there is evidence that they are sensitive to the distinct conceptual consequences of naming objects with the same vs different names (Althaus & Westerman, 2016; Dewar & Xu, 2007; Ferguson & Waxman, 2016; Waxman & Braun, 2005). We ask whether naming influences not only the number of object categories infants form along the continuum, but also, whether category membership is perceived as discrete or as a more continuous factor.…”

Learned Labels Shape Pre‐speech Infants’ Object Representations

“…Equally, labels heard in‐the‐moment also begin to exert a powerful influence on processing during the first year. For example, the in‐task presence of a novel label can direct ten‐month‐old infants’ attention to commonalities between category exemplars and guide online category formation (Althaus & Plunkett, 2015; Plunkett, Hu, & Cohen, 2008), and labels themselves facilitate the formation of new representations over other auditory cues (e.g., Althaus & Westermann, 2016; for a review, see Robinson, Best, Deng, & Sloutsky, 2012). …”