The Role of Language in the Acquisition of Kind Concepts

Northeastern University, Boston MA

Investigators

Abstract

The proposed research will investigate the relation between early language acquisition and how children acquire concepts. Specifically, how learning words for kinds of objects such as "dog" and "cup" may lead the infant to organize the world in terms of kinds of physical entities and how this process changes the infant's object representations. Previous studies have shown that there may be a major developmental change in infant's ability to individuate objects towards the end of the first year: Infants as young as 4 months are able to use spatiotemporal information for establishing representations of two distinct objects, but it is not until somewhere between 10 and 12 months that they are able to use object kind information to do so. That is, infants understand that objects travel on continuous paths and if a spatiotemporal discontinuity is detected, they will conclude that a second, distinct object is involved. In contrast, if shown, say, a toy duck and a cup emerging from behind a screen and returning, one at a time, 12- but not 10-month-old infants would conclude that there are two distinct objects behind the screen. Furthermore, several studies have shown that infants are able to use labeling to facilitate categorization and toddlers are able to use labels as a source of information for inductive inference. The current proposal tests the hypothesis that infants may use distinct labels to pick out the kinds of objects in their environment, that is, the process of learning words such as "dog" and "cup" is the process of acquiring kind concepts dog and cup. Learning these words may subsequently impact on infants' object representations, their concept of kind, and their ability to make inductive inference. These hypotheses will be investigated with several methods, including a violation of expectancy looking time method, a manual search method, and an inductive inference method. The results of these experiments should lead to a more detailed and deeper understanding of the relation between early language acquisition and cognitive development in the domain of learning count nouns and acquiring kind concepts. In the future these results may be helpful to researchers in early education.