Abstract
This study examined whether infants privilege shape over other perceptual properties when making inferences about the shared properties of novel objects. Forty-six 15-month-olds were presented with novel target objects that possessed a nonobvious property, followed by test objects that varied in shape, color, or texture relative to the target. Infants generalized the nonobvious property to test objects that were highly similar in shape, but not to objects that shared the same color or texture. These results demonstrate that infants’ attention to shape is not specific to lexical contexts and is present at the early stages of productive language development. The implications of these findings for debates about children's shape bias, in particular, and the nature of infants’ categories more generally, are discussed.
Highlights
This study examined whether infants privilege shape over other perceptual properties when making inferences about the shared properties of novel objects
Forty-six 15-month-olds were presented with novel target objects that possessed a nonobvious property, followed by test objects that varied in shape, color, or texture relative to the target
The target object possessed a nonobvious property that could be elicited by a target action but the test objects did not have this property
Summary
This study examined whether infants privilege shape over other perceptual properties when making inferences about the shared properties of novel objects. Infants generalized the nonobvious property to test objects that were highly similar in shape, but not to objects that shared the same color or texture These results demonstrate that infants’ attention to shape is not specific to lexical contexts and is present at the early stages of productive language development. Using visual preference and object examining methodologies, proponents of “perceptual” categorization have found that infants group objects into categories based on particular visual properties (Oakes, Coppage, & Dingle, 1997; Rakison & Butterworth, 1998). To assess these alternative accounts, it is important to investigate similar phenomena. Consistent are process models of the shape bias in word learning (Colunga & Smith, 2008; Samuelson & Horst, 2008; Landau et al, 1988; Smith & Samuelson, 2006)
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