The influence of naming on categorization in infancy

命名对婴儿期分类的影响

• 批准号: 6702389
• 负责人: Anne Louise Fulkerson
• 金额: $ 14.2万
• 依托单位: UNIVERSITY OF TOLEDO
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 财政年份: 2004
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2004-02-01 至 2007-01-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/6702389
• 关键词: auditory stimulus; behavior test; behavioral /social science research tag; child psychology; clinical research; cognition; early experience; human subject; infant human (0-1 year); language development; neural information processing; preference; verbal learning; visual perception; visual stimulus

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The ability to form categories that capture commonalities among objects and events in the environment is a critical aspect of adaptive functioning. Recent studies on categorization abilities of infants indicate that naming objects from the same category with a shared label facilitates the formation of object categories in infants as young as nine months of age. The current project extends this research by addressing three main issues in a series of studies with the visual familiarization/novelty-preference paradigm. The first aim is to track the developmental course of the influence of naming on categorization during the first year of life by comparing infants' response to word labels and nonlinguistic sounds in 6-, 9-, and 12-month-olds. At issue is whether word labels and nonlinguistic auditory stimuli both facilitate infants' object categorization relative to no sound early in development, and whether a general effect of sound later gives way to a more specific influence of word labels. The second aim is to evaluate whether the influence of word labels and nonlinguistic auditory stimuli on infants' object categorization results from infants' increased visual attention to category members in the presence of sound or from infants' detection of an association between category exemplars and a specific sound pattern. And the third aim is to examine the characteristics of word labels that lead to their facilitation of categorization at 6-, 9-, and 12-months of age. More specifically, is the influence of word labels on categorization related to the presentation of language in general, infant-directed language, or to the specific introduction of object labels (in English, count nouns in particular)? Results from the proposed studies will have implications for theories of language development regarding the basic processes underlying word teaming and address deep issues regarding the relationship between language and categorization in early development. Understanding how these basic processes develop normally will help to establish age-based standards for normal cognitive achievements and lay the foundation for understanding how such processes go awry, ultimately leading to the development of early assessment and intervention techniques for specific language impairments.

描述（由申请人提供）：在环境中形成捕获物体和事件之间共性的类别的能力是适应性功能的一个关键方面。最近对婴儿分类能力的研究表明，在9个月大的婴儿中，用一个共同的标签来命名同一类别的物体有助于物体类别的形成。目前的项目通过解决视觉熟悉/新奇偏好范式的一系列研究中的三个主要问题来扩展这项研究。第一个目的是通过比较6个月、9个月和12个月婴儿对单词标签和非语言声音的反应，追踪命名对一岁婴儿分类影响的发展过程。问题在于，相对于在发育早期没有声音，单词标签和非语言听觉刺激是否都促进了婴儿对对象的分类，以及声音的一般影响是否会让位于单词标签的更具体影响。第二个目的是评估单词标签和非语言听觉刺激对婴儿对象分类的影响是由于婴儿在声音存在时对类别成员的视觉注意增加，还是由于婴儿发现类别范例与特定声音模式之间的联系。第三个目的是检查单词标签的特征，这些特征导致他们在6个月、9个月和12个月大时易于分类。更具体地说，单词标签对分类的影响是与语言的一般呈现、婴儿指向语言有关，还是与对象标签的具体引入（在英语中，特别是可数名词）有关？这些研究的结果将对语言发展的理论产生影响，这些理论涉及词组的基本过程，并解决早期发展中语言与分类之间关系的深层问题。了解这些基本过程如何正常发展将有助于建立基于年龄的正常认知成就标准，并为理解这些过程如何出错奠定基础，最终导致开发针对特定语言障碍的早期评估和干预技术。