Linguistic versus attentional influences on nonlinguistic categorization in 15-month-old infants

Roberts, Kenneth; Jacob, Marianne

doi:10.1016/0885-2014(91)90044-e

Cited by 50 publications

(59 citation statements)

References 47 publications

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“…Meanwhile, linguistic labels enhance object categorization by providing additional teaching signals. Our simulation results provide a dynamic view of the essential interactions between word learning and object categorization that is quite in line with evidence obtained from empirical studies (Roberts and Jacob 1991, Waxman 2004, Landau 2004, Yoshida and Smith 2005, suggesting the cognitive plausibility of our model. Several aspects in word acquisition are simplified in the present model.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 75%

The emergence of links between lexical acquisition and object categorization: a computational study

2005

Connection Science

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Language is about symbols, and those symbols must be grounded in the physical world. Children learn to associate language with sensorimotor experiences during their development. In light of this, we first provide a computational account of how words are mapped to their perceptually grounded meanings. Moreover, the main part of this work proposes and implements a computational model of how word learning influences the formation of object categories to which those words refer. This model simulates the bi-directional relationship between word and object category learning: (1) object categorization provides mental representations of meanings that are mapped to words to form lexical items; (2) linguistic labels help object categorization by providing additional teaching signals; and (3) these two learning processes interplay with each other and form a developmental feedback loop. Compared with the method that performs these two tasks separately, our model shows promising improvements in both word-to-world mapping and perceptual categorization, suggesting a unified view of lexical and category learning in an integrative framework. Most importantly, this work provides a cognitively plausible explanation of the mechanistic nature of early word learning and object learning from co-occurring multisensory data.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 75%

The emergence of links between lexical acquisition and object categorization: a computational study

2005

Connection Science

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“…The present results demonstrate that a specific label directs infants' attention not only to commonalities across objects and object properties (Balaban & Waxman, 1997;Booth & Waxman, 2002;Roberts & Jacob, 1991;Waxman & Booth, 2001) but also to commonalities in a spatial relation. Hearing the word "on" presented with each example of support during habituation aided infants in attending to the support relation, a commonality that was not apparent to infants when viewing the events in silence.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 79%

Can Language Do the Driving? The Effect of Linguistic Input on Infants' Categorization of Support Spatial Relations.

Casasola¹

2005

Developmental Psychology

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Two experiments explored the effect of linguistic input on 18-month-olds' ability to form an abstract categorical representation of support. Infants were habituated to 4 support events (i.e., one object placed on another) and were tested with a novel support and a novel containment event. Infants formed an abstract category of support (i.e., looked significantly longer at the novel than familiar relation) when hearing the word "on" during habituation but not when viewing the events in silence (Experiment 1) or when hearing general phrases or a novel word (Experiment 2). Results indicate that a familiar word can facilitate infants' formation of an abstract spatial category, leading them to form a category that they do not form in the absence of the word.On one side of the long-standing debate on the relation between thought and language has been the view that language can be a strong force in the development of particular concepts (Gopnik & Choi, 1995;Gopnik, Choi, & Baumberger, 1996;Vygotsky, 1962;Xu, 1999). This view has been particularly prominent in discussions of how children acquire the meanings expressed in relational terms, such as verbs and prepositions (Bowerman & Choi, 2001, with some researchers proposing that language may guide the development of relational concepts (e.g., Bowerman, 1996;Bowerman & Choi, 2001;Gentner & Boroditsky, 2001;Talmy, 1983). Language does guide how young children organize spatial events into language-specific semantic spatial categories (Choi & Bowerman, 1991), raising the question of whether experience with a particular spatial morpheme inspires children to form categories of spatial events that they may not otherwise form. However, a lack of experimental evidence has made the feasibility of this argument difficult to measure. Given that a specific word can facilitate infants' ability to form a category of objects (e.g., Balaban & Waxman, 1997;Waxman & Markow, 1995), it is possible that analogous results could be obtained with infants' ability to form an abstract categorical representation of a spatial relation. To explore this possibility, I examined the effect of linguistic input on infants' ability to form an abstract categorical representation of a spatial relation across two experiments.One reason that language is thought to shape the spatial categories that young children form is the myriad ways in which languages organize spatial events, such as placing a cup on the table or a picture on the wall, into the same or many different semantic categories (Bowerman, 1989(Bowerman, , 1996. Perhaps the most well-known example is the difference between English and Korean (Choi & Bowerman, 1991). English speakers linguistically divide events with containment and support relations into two distinct semantic categories: They label containment events as "in" and support events as "on." In contrast, Korean speakers Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Marianella Casasola, Department of Human Development, Cornell University, G38 MVR Hall, Ithaca, NY 1...

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“…And how is this knowledge brought to bear and realized in real time when a child encounters a real speaker and a novel object? Increasing evidence suggests that the answers may be found in the operating characteristics of perceiving and remembering (Merriman & Stevenson, 1997;Roberts & Jacob, 1991;Saffran, Aslin, & Newport, 1996;Smith, Jones, & Landau, 1996;Stager & Werker, 1997). We brießy consider three lines of evidence from our own work.…”

Section: Early Word Learningmentioning

confidence: 94%

Grounding Development in Cognitive Processes

Samuelson

Smith

2000

Child Development

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Developmentalists have made remarkable progress over the last several decades in detailing what children know at various points in development. Less progress has been made, however, in detailing the processes through which knowledge is realized in real-time tasks, or in detailing the processes of developmental change. We argue that the operating characteristics of perceiving and remembering provide a foundation for making progress on these issues in the next century. We include three examples applying these ideas to specific phenomena in early word learning. These examples illustrate how forming developmental hypotheses in terms of perceiving and remembering may bring new insights into specific phenomena as well as into how the ordinary operating characteristics of perceiving and remembering serve as bootstraps to more specialized and more abstract kinds of knowledge.

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Linguistic versus attentional influences on nonlinguistic categorization in 15-month-old infants

Cited by 50 publications

References 47 publications

The emergence of links between lexical acquisition and object categorization: a computational study

The emergence of links between lexical acquisition and object categorization: a computational study

Can Language Do the Driving? The Effect of Linguistic Input on Infants' Categorization of Support Spatial Relations.

Grounding Development in Cognitive Processes

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