Concept-Based Word Learning in Human Infants

Jun Yin*, Gergely Csibra

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract (may include machine translation)

Whether infants initially learn object labels by mapping them onto similarity-defining perceptual features or onto concepts of object kinds remains under debate. We addressed this question by attempting to teach infants words for behaviorally defined action roles. In a series of experiments, we found that 14-month-olds could rapidly learn a label for the role played by the chaser in a chasing scenario, even when the different instances of chasers did not share perceptual features. Furthermore, when infants could choose, they preferred to interpret a novel label as expressing the agent’s role within the observed interaction rather than as being associated with the agent’s appearance. These results demonstrate that infants can learn labels as easily (or even more easily) for concepts identified by abstract behavioral characteristics as for objects identified by perceptual features. Thus, at early stages of word learning, infants already expect that novel words express concepts.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)1316-1324
Number of pages9
JournalPsychological Science
Volume26
Issue number8
DOIs
StatePublished - 7 Aug 2015

Keywords

  • chasing action
  • concepts
  • object kinds
  • open data
  • open materials
  • perceptual similarity
  • word learning

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