Abstract
We examined how naming objects with unique labels influenced infants’ reasoning about the non-obvious properties of novel objects. Seventy 14- to 16-month-olds participated in an imitation-based inductive inference task during which they were presented with target objects possessing a non-obvious sound property, followed by test objects that varied in shape similarity in comparison to the target. Infants were assigned to one of two groups: a No Label group in which objects were introduced with a general attentional phrase (i.e., “Look at this one”) and a Distinct Label group in which target and test objects were labeled with two distinct count nouns (i.e., fep vs. wug). Infants in the Distinct Label group performed significantly fewer target actions on the high-similarity objects than infants in the No Label group but did not differ in performance of actions on the low-similarity object. Within the Distinct Label group, performance on the inductive inference task was related to age, but not to working memory, inhibitory control, or vocabulary. Within the No Label condition, performance on the inductive inference task was related to a measure of inhibitory control. Our findings suggest that between 14- and 16-months, infants begin to use labels to carve out distinct categories, even when objects are highly perceptually similar.
Highlights
Naming plays a critical role in infants’ categorization and inductive reasoning, helping infants to unite diverse objects into categories and guiding their inferences about the shared properties of category members (e.g., Waxman and Booth, 2001; Welder and Graham, 2001; Graham et al, 2004; Plunkett et al, 2008; Ferry et al, 2010)
In the second set of analyses, we examined the relations between age, executive function and vocabulary size and infants’ performance on the inductive inference task
Our findings indicate that age, perhaps as an index of general cognitive maturation, but not working memory, inhibitory control, or vocabulary, contributes to this developing ability
Summary
Naming plays a critical role in infants’ categorization and inductive reasoning, helping infants to unite diverse objects into categories and guiding their inferences about the shared properties of category members (e.g., Waxman and Booth, 2001; Welder and Graham, 2001; Graham et al, 2004; Plunkett et al, 2008; Ferry et al, 2010). Research has demonstrated that basic forms of inductive reasoning emerge early in Infants Attend to Distinct Labels development; infants between 9- and 11-months form categorybased inductive inferences about the shared properties of animate (McDonough and Mandler, 1998; Vukatana et al, 2015) and inanimate objects (Baldwin et al, 1993)
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