Authors:

Lauren Delapenha

Date Created:

Not specified

Course Title:

Professor:

Not specified

About Paper:

Current research suggests that infants can develop language categories as early as six months of age through listening to verbal communication in their environments [1]. However, it is unclear how language labels affect an infant's memory of object categories in more dynamic situations, such as with an occlusion task. It is also unknown how persistent language categories are with aging, especially in the complex newborn-infant stage of development. Therefore, two studies in 12-month and 7-month olds were conducted to investigate if naming objects with distinct language labels with a change-detection task positively impacted their object categorization skills. Infants were shown one 3-minute-long video, which included a learning phase with four trials. Stuffed animals were shown with verbal pseudowords (e.g. boff, dax, vep). In two test trials, a stuffed animal from the learning phase was shown and then covered with a blocker. After removing the blocker, the stuffed animal was either the same as before the blocker was placed or different. The infants' level of surprise, and therefore individuation of the animal as a separate object category [2], was determined from their average looking time after the blocker was removed. Participant videos were coded for eye movement through the platform Datavyu. As predicted, there was a significant increase in average looking time in the distinct naming Within Change condition in the 12-month-old study. This indicates that strong object individuation occurred, and that it persisted over the dynamic change-detection task. The 7-month-old study is currently ongoing, and preliminary findings show that more participants are needed to determine statistical significance and make final conclusions. We believe that linguistically naming objects can improve an infant's object categorization and memory skills, which may influence how caregivers interact with children to improve their overall language and cognitive development.

Source:

Northwestern University

Topics:

No topics listed

Co-authors:

Lauren Delapenha