Timing matters: The impact of label synchrony on infant categorisation

Abstract

HighlightsWe report an eye tracking study with 12-month-olds learning a novel category.Synchronous labels lead to a decrease in object-level novelty preference.Detailed eye-tracking data reveal that this is not due to overshadowing.Increased load appears to shift looking towards familiarity preference.Our findings reconcile previous contradictory results on the impact of labelling.

What the [beep]? Six-month-olds link novel communicative signals to meaning

“…Instead, infants’ performance varied as a function of the communicative context in which the tones were introduced. Thus, the current results underscore the inadequacy of appealing to signal familiarity alone to account for the facilitative effect of language on categorization (see also Althaus & Plunkett, 2015; Booth & Waxman, 2009; Ferry et al, 2013; Gliga, Volein, & Csibra, 2010; Noles & Gelman, 2012; Plunkett, 2008). …”

Effects of Linguistic Labels on Visual Attention in Children and Young Adults

“…The few developmental studies that have used an eye tracker to directly test the hypothesis that labeling facilitates category learning by highlighting category relevant features are mixed. For example, support for the hypothesis primarily comes from work by Althaus and colleagues ( Althaus and Mareschal, 2014 ; Althaus and Plunkett, 2015a , b ; Althaus and Westermann, 2016 ). Using variations of familiarization procedures, these studies demonstrate that by 10- to 12-months of age labels direct attention to commonalities, with infants in the label conditions often requiring less familiarization before looking at common features ( Althaus and Mareschal, 2014 ).…”

“…It is also important to note that these effects do not appear to generalize to other types of auditory cues such as nonlinguistic sounds ( Althaus and Mareschal, 2014 ; Althaus and Westermann, 2016 ). Infants are also sensitive to the timing of the linguistic labels, with synchronous timing of auditory and visual information sometimes interfering with familiarization ( Althaus and Plunkett, 2015b ). Finally, there is some evidence that effects of labels on visual attention occur before the labels are presented ( Althaus and Mareschal, 2014 ).…”

“…Discrepancies across the studies might also stem from some multisensory conditions interfering with visual processing. For example, presenting linguistic input and visual stimuli at the same time can attenuate categorization in 12-month-olds ( Althaus and Plunkett, 2015b ) and facilitation effects of labels disappear when the presentation of speech is not contingent on 15-month-old infants’ looking ( Roberts, 1995 ). Auditory dominance studies also show that the presence of an auditory stimulus, including spoken words, can interfere with visual processing early in 8- to 16-month-old infants and 4-year-olds ( Lewkowicz, 1988a , b ; Sloutsky and Napolitano, 2003 ; Robinson and Sloutsky, 2004 , 2007b ; Sloutsky and Robinson, 2008 ; Nava and Pavani, 2013 ).…”

“…To fill this gap, the present study employed a novel procedure to examine fixations as 8-year-olds and adults were simultaneously familiarized to novel creatures from three different sparse categories. Given the discrepancies found in infant and child research testing effects of labels on attention ( Best et al, 2010 , 2011 ; Althaus and Mareschal, 2014 ; Althaus and Plunkett, 2015a , b ; Deng and Sloutsky, 2015 ; Althaus and Westermann, 2016 ), auditory overshadowing effects found in infants and young children ( Lewkowicz, 1988a , b ; Sloutsky and Napolitano, 2003 ; Robinson and Sloutsky, 2004 , 2007b ; Sloutsky and Robinson, 2008 ; Nava and Pavani, 2013 ), the difficulty of the present task with the simultaneous presentation of three categories, and the fact that we trained participants on sparse categories which are difficult for young children ( Kloos and Sloutsky, 2008 ; Sloutsky, 2010 ), we recruited 8-year-old children who should have better attentional control and should be less affected by simultaneously presented auditory information. Given that child participants were significantly older than children used in previous research, we were not expecting to find age differences in looking to category relevant features.…”