Collaborative Research: Assessment of Infants' Object Concepts

婴儿和年龄较大的幼儿是否将物体世界区分为基本相似的类别的问题已经持续了几十年，主要是由于缺乏在各种年龄段有效的评估分类的方法。 语言前婴儿的概念必须通过独立于语言的技术进行检查，而语言产生和理解通常对幼儿早期概念的评估至关重要。 确定年龄较小和较大的婴儿是否拥有相似类型的概念，与更广泛的问题有关，这些问题涉及认知发展的连续性或不连续性。 一方面，婴儿和年龄较大的幼儿的范畴扩展之间的差异可能是由于不同的评估方法或对物体的不同经验水平。 即使在同一个年龄组内，婴儿也可能在不同的分类任务中产生不同的类别扩展模式，因为这些任务在注意力和其他信息处理需求方面有所不同。 另一方面，在前语言婴儿和知道事物名称的较大婴儿之间可能存在根本的差异，因为他们拥有质的不同的表征系统。 根据这一解释，组内分类差异的出现是因为不同的程序利用不同的分类过程。 本研究将介绍一种新的方法，一个理解措施的联想概括，这是为了帮助确定的基础上组间和组内的变化，在婴儿期的分类。 在这种方法中，偏好注视将作为婴儿对概念边界理解的一个指标，并将纠正与模仿和标签等基于生产的反应相关的方法学问题。 在整个项目的三个连续阶段中，将使用联想概括的理解测量来探索婴儿对玩具复制品的理解，这些玩具复制品通常用于早期分类研究中，作为对应的真实的物体的符号，并区分概念出现的三种替代发展序列：（1）领域优先：婴儿的早期概念本质上是全局的（例如，在动物或交通工具的水平）和广义概念控制婴儿的类别属性的关联;（2）基本优先：婴儿的初始概念处于基本水平（例如，狗，猫，汽车，或卡车），并通过生产为基础的模仿任务获得的领域水平的概括归因于过度延伸的基本水平类别;和（3）可变的特异性：婴儿拥有初步的知识，不同类型的属性是对齐的类别在不同水平的特异性。 最后一个将意味着某些属性是在基本水平上概括的，而其他属性是在领域水平上概括的;这种意识将构成对类包含关系的不对称性的初步理解的证据。习惯化）和适合于年龄较大的幼儿的任务（例如，命名、连续触摸）。 这样的工具将使研究人员能够敏感地测试分类过程在生命的头两年保持稳定的程度，并将为旨在促进早期词汇发展的干预计划的发展提供有用的数据。

The question of whether infants and older toddlers differentiate the world of objects into fundamentally similar kinds of categories has persisted for decades, largely due to the absence of methods for assessing categorization that are effective across a wide variety of ages. The concepts of preverbal infants must be examined through techniques that are independent of language, while language production and comprehension typically are vital to the assessment of toddlers' early concepts. Determining whether younger and older infants possess similar types of concepts is relevant to broader questions concerning the degree to which cognitive development is continuous or discontinuous. On the one hand, differences between the category extensions of infants and older toddlers may be due to different methods of assessment or to different levels of experience with objects. Even within a single age group, infants may produce different patterns of category extension across different categorization tasks because the tasks vary in terms of attentional and other information-processing demands. On the other hand, fundamental differences may exist between prelinguistic infants and older infants who know names for things because they possess qualitatively different representational systems. By this account, within-group variations in categorization emerge because different procedures tap different categorization processes. This research will introduce a new method, a comprehension measure of associative generalization, that is intended to help determine the basis for between-group and within-group variations in categorization during infancy. In this method, preferred looking will serve as an index of infants' understanding of conceptual boundaries and will correct for methodological problems associated with production-based responses such as imitation and labeling. Throughout three consecutive phases of the project, the comprehension measure of associative generalization will be used to explore infants' understanding of the toy replicas often used in studies of early categorization as symbols for the corresponding real objects, and to differentiate among three alternative developmental sequences in the emergence of concepts: (1) Domain-first: Infants' early concepts are global in nature (e.g., at the level of animal or vehicle) and broad concepts control infants' associations of category properties; (2) Basic-first: Infants' initial concepts are at the basic level (e.g., dog, cat, car, or truck), and domain-level generalizations obtained through production-based imitation tasks are attributable to overextensions of basic level categories; and (3) Variable specificity: Infants possess rudimentary knowledge that different types of properties are aligned with categories at different levels of specificity. The last would imply that certain properties are generalized at the basic level, and others are generalized at the domain level; such awareness would constitute evidence for rudimentary understanding of the asymmetry of class inclusion relations.The development of a comprehension-based analog to productive imitation measures has tremendous potential to serve as a methodological "bridge" between tasks appropriate for younger infants (e.g., habituation) and tasks suitable for older toddlers (e.g., naming, successive touching). Such a tool will enable researchers to sensitively test the degree to which categorization processes remain stable throughout the first two years of life and will provide useful data for the development of intervention programs aimed at facilitating early lexical development.