Abstract
We examined the role of distinct labels on infants’ inductive inferences. Thirty-six 15-month-old infants were presented with target objects that possessed a non-obvious property, followed by test objects that varied in shape similarity relative to the target. Infants were tested in one of two groups, a Same Label group in which target and test objects were labeled with the same noun, and a Distinct Label group in which target and test objects were labeled with different nouns. When target and test objects were labeled with the same count noun, infants generalized the non-obvious property to both test objects, regardless of similarity to the target. In contrast, labeling the target and test objects with different count nouns attenuated infants’ generalization of the non-obvious property to both high and low-similarity test objects. Our results suggest that by 15 months, infants recognize that object labels provide information about underlying object kind and appreciate that distinct labels are used to designate members of different categories.
Highlights
Infants’ early categorization abilities permit them to organize the vast diversity of entities in their environment into categories, comprised of like kinds, and to use these categories as the basis for inductive inferences
When target and test objects were labeled with the same novel count noun, we expected that infants would infer that objects shared non-obvious properties, regardless of shape similarity
When target and test objects were labeled with distinct count nouns, we expected that infants would be less likely to infer that objects shared non-obvious properties, even if they were highly similar
Summary
Infants’ early categorization abilities permit them to organize the vast diversity of entities in their environment into categories, comprised of like kinds, and to use these categories as the basis for inductive inferences. Once a child categorizes an individual object as a member of a particular kind (e.g., a dog), she can make inferences about properties of that object (e.g., barks). Research has documented that naming plays an instrumental role in young children’s categorization and inferences: naming a set of objects with the same name highlights similarities among them that might otherwise have been overlooked on the basis of perceptual analysis alone (e.g., Gelman and Markman, 1986, 1987; Gelman and Coley, 1990; Welder and Graham, 2001). We examined whether 15-month-old infants will infer that objects belong to different categories when they are labeled with different names, even if this label information conflicts with other cues to category membership (i.e., object similarity)
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