The role of language in acquiring object kind concepts in infancy

by: Fei Xu

Cognition, Vol. 85, No. 3. (October 2002), pp. 223-250.

View FullText article

DOI, ScienceDirect

Reviews [Write a review of this article]

There are no reviews of this article

Find related articles from these CiteULike users

voiklis, ColDyn (group), briordan

Find related articles with these CiteULike tags

category-learning, category-learning-use, _d_socio-informational-constraints, empirical, word-learning

Abstract

Four experiments investigated whether 9-month-old infants could use the presence of labels to help them establish a representation of two distinct objects in a complex object individuation task. We found that the presence of two distinct labels facilitated object individuation, but the presence of one label for both objects, two distinct tones, two distinct sounds, or two distinct emotional expressions did not. These findings suggest that language may play an important role in the acquisition of sortal/object kind concepts in infancy: words may serve as "essence placeholders". Implications for the relationship between language and conceptual development are discussed.

@article{citeulike:1116956, abstract = {Four experiments investigated whether 9-month-old infants could use the presence of labels to help them establish a representation of two distinct objects in a complex object individuation task. We found that the presence of two distinct labels facilitated object individuation, but the presence of one label for both objects, two distinct tones, two distinct sounds, or two distinct emotional expressions did not. These findings suggest that language may play an important role in the acquisition of sortal/object kind concepts in infancy: words may serve as "essence placeholders". Implications for the relationship between language and conceptual development are discussed.}, author = {Xu, Fei }, citeulike-article-id = {1116956}, doi = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/S0010-0277(02)00109-9}, journal = {Cognition}, keywords = {\_d\_socio-informational-constraints, category-learning-use, empirical}, month = {October}, number = {3}, pages = {223--250}, posted-at = {2007-02-21 20:35:23}, priority = {2}, title = {The role of language in acquiring object kind concepts in infancy}, url = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/S0010-0277(02)00109-9}, volume = {85}, year = {2002} }

RIS record

TY - JOUR ID - citeulike:1116956 L3 - citeulike-article-id:1116956 N2 - Four experiments investigated whether 9-month-old infants could use the presence of labels to help them establish a representation of two distinct objects in a complex object individuation task. We found that the presence of two distinct labels facilitated object individuation, but the presence of one label for both objects, two distinct tones, two distinct sounds, or two distinct emotional expressions did not. These findings suggest that language may play an important role in the acquisition of sortal/object kind concepts in infancy: words may serve as "essence placeholders". Implications for the relationship between language and conceptual development are discussed. IS - 3 JF - Cognition EP - 250 TI - The role of language in acquiring object kind concepts in infancy VL - 85 SP - 223 KW - _d_socio-informational-constraints KW - category-learning-use KW - empirical AU - Xu, Fei PY - 2002/10// UR - http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/S0010-0277(02)00109-9 ER -

RIS BibTeX