The influence of naming on categorization in infancy

描述(由申请人提供)：形成能够捕捉环境中对象和事件之间的共性的类别的能力是适应性运作的关键方面。最近关于婴儿分类能力的研究表明，在九个月大的婴儿中，用相同的标签命名来自同一类别的物体有助于形成物体类别。目前的项目通过使用视觉熟悉/新奇偏好范式解决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个月大的婴儿对单词标签和非语言声音的反应，来追踪命名对分类的影响在生命的第一年的发展过程。争论的焦点是，相对于发育早期没有声音的婴儿，单词标签和非语言听觉刺激是否都有助于婴儿对物体的分类，以及以后声音的一般效应是否会让位于单词标签的更具体影响。第二个目的是评估词标签和非语言听觉刺激对婴儿物体分类的影响，是因为婴儿在有声音的情况下对类别成员的视觉注意增加，还是因为婴儿发现了类别样本与特定声音模式之间的联系。第三个目标是考察单词标签在6个月、9个月和12个月龄时促进分类的特征。更具体地说，词标签对分类的影响是与一般的语言呈现有关，还是与对象标签的具体引入有关(在英语中，特别是计数名词)？这项研究的结果将对语言发展的理论产生影响，这些理论涉及词汇组合的基本过程，并解决了关于语言和早期发展中分类之间的关系的深层次问题。了解这些基本过程是如何正常发展的，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，最终导致针对特定语言障碍的早期评估和干预技术的发展。

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.