When Less Is More: How Infants Learn to Form an Abstract Categorical Representation of Support

Marianella Casasola

90 citations0/0 files storedChild Development

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Child and Animal Learning Development Language Development and Disorders Categorization, perception, and language

Abstract

If after teaching a label for 1 object, a speaker does not name a nearby object, 3-year-olds tend to reject the label for the nearby object (W.E. Merriman, J.M. Marazita, L.H. Jarvis, J.A. Evey-Burkey, and M. Biggins, 1995a). In Studies 1 (5-year-olds) and 3 (3-year-olds), this effect depended on object similarity. In Study 2, when a speaker used a label without teaching it, 5-year-olds showed no passover effect. 3-year-olds showed none for inanimate objects, but one for animate objects. When extraneous factors that may have promoted animate object individuation were eliminated (Study 3), 3-year-olds showed the effect when a label was taught, but not when it was merely used. Children honor rational restrictions on when the unacceptability of a name can be inferred from its nonoccurrence.

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References

1968On the genesis of abstract ideas.2002Variability and Detection of Invariant Structure 1988Metaphor as Structure Mapping: The Relational Shift 1991Language and the career of similarity 1996Comparison and Categorization in the Development of Relational Similarity 1999Comparison in the Development of Categories 1999Object individuation: infants’ use of shape, size, pattern, and color 1990Infant perception of a causal event

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2010Trading Spaces: Carving up Events for Learning Language 2010The role of comparison in preschoolers’ novel object categorization 2007Do Novel Words Facilitate 18-Month-Olds’ Spatial Categorization?2009Input Effects Within a Constructionist Framework 2010The Making of Human Concepts 2015Listening through voices: Infant statistical word segmentation across multiple speakers.

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