When knowing the name of objects is not enough to categorize them

Abstract

Two experiments explored 16-month-olds' learning of new nouns, and their use of these nouns to categorize objects. In both experiments, infants were presented with triads of perceptually dissimilar objects, which were given made-up names, two of the objects receiving the same name. Following each training phase, infants were tested on whether: (a) they could use the names to categorize the objects (Experiment 1), or (b) they had actually learned the association between the names and the objects (Experiment 2). Our results show that 16-month-olds can simultaneously learn the name of three objects, but cannot use these newly learned names to categorize the objects in the absence of any other cue to categorization. These results are discussed in light of different hypotheses regarding the way infants come to use names to categorize objects.

Acknowledgments

This research was supported by a grant from the European Science Foundation EUROCORES program “The Origin of Man, Language and Languages” to TN.

We would like to thank the participants and their families for their time and co-operation, and Valérie Camos and Galina Iakimova for comments on a previous version of this paper.

Notes

¹The first trial was considered a practice trial, giving infants an opportunity to “practise” the task once. It was identical to the six test trials except that if the infants' initial response was incorrect, the presentation of the objects and the categorization question were repeated to give them another chance to make the correct choice (although the infants were not told that the answer was incorrect). The nonwords used for the training trial were laf and nim.