Hostname: page-component-76fb5796d-vvkck Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-25T19:24:17.354Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Linking language and categorization in infancy*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 November 2016

BROCK FERGUSON  and
SANDRA WAXMAN
BROCK FERGUSON
Affiliation:
Northwestern University
SANDRA WAXMAN*
Affiliation:
Northwestern University
*
Address for correspondence: Sandra Waxman, Psychology Department, Northwestern University, 2029 Sheridan Rd., Evanston, IL, USA60208. e-mail: s-waxman@northwestern.edu
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Language exerts a powerful influence on our concepts. We review evidence documenting the developmental origins of a precocious link between language and object categories in very young infants. This collection of studies documents a cascading process in which early links between language and cognition provide the foundation for later, more precise ones. We propose that, early in life, language promotes categorization at least in part through its status as a social, communicative signal. But over the first year, infants home in on the referential power of language and, by their second year, begin teasing apart distinct kinds of names (e.g. nouns, adjectives) and their relation to distinct kinds of concepts (e.g. object categories, properties). To complement this proposal, we also relate this evidence to several alternative accounts of language's effect on categorization, appealing to similarity (‘labels-as-features’), familiarity (‘auditory overshadowing’), and communicative biases (‘natural pedagogy’).

Type
Interfaces between cognition and language development edited by Johanne Paradis and Cecile De Cat
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 44 , Issue 3 , May 2017 , pp. 527 - 552
Check for updates
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2016 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

[*]

This research was supported by a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Doctoral Fellowship awarded to B.F. and a grant from the National Institutes of Health (R01HD083310) to S.W. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health. We are grateful to the Project on Child Development at Northwestern University and especially to all of the parents and children who have participated in our projects.

References

REFERENCES

Anggoro, F. K., Waxman, S. R. & Medin, D. L. (2008). Naming practices and the acquisition of key biological concepts. Psychological Science 19(4), 314–9.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Arunachalam, S., Escovar, E., Hansen, M. A. & Waxman, S. R. (2013). Out of sight, but not out of mind: 21-month-olds use syntactic information to learn verbs even in the absence of a corresponding event. Language and Cognitive Processes 28(4), 417–25.Google Scholar
Arunachalam, S. & Waxman, S. R. (2010). Meaning from syntax: evidence from 2-year-olds. Cognition 114, 442–6.Google Scholar
Aslin, R. N. (1993). Segmentation of fluent speech into words: learning models and the role of maternal input. In de Boysson-Bardies, B., de Schonen, S., Jusczky, P., McNeilage, P. & Morton, J. (eds), Developmental Neurocognition: Speech and Face Processing in the First Year of Life, 1st ed., 305–15. Norwell, MA: Kluwer.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Balaban, M. T. & Waxman, S. R. (1997). Do words facilitate object categorization in 9-month-old infants? Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 64, 3–26.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Bergelson, E. & Swingley, D. (2012). At 6–9 months, human infants know the meanings of many common nouns. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 109(9), 3253–8.Google Scholar
Bergelson, E. & Swingley, D. (2013). The acquisition of abstract words by young infants. Cognition 127(3), 391–7.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Bergelson, E. & Swingley, D. (2015). Early word comprehension in infants: replication and extension. Language Learning and Development 11(4), 369–80.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Bhatt, R. S., Wasserman, E. A., Reynolds, W. F. & Knauss, K. S. (1988). Conceptual behavior in pigeons: categorization of both familiar and novel examples from four classes of natural and artificial stimuli. Journal of Experimental Psychology Animal Behavior Processes 14(3), 219–34.Google Scholar
Booth, A. & Waxman, S. R. (2003). Mapping words to the world in infancy: infants' expectations for count nouns and adjectives. Journal of Cognition and Development 4(3), 357–81.Google Scholar
Booth, A. & Waxman, S. R. (2009). A horse of a different color: specifying with precision infants’ mappings of novel nouns and adjectives. Child Development 80(1), 15–22.Google Scholar
Bortfeld, H., Morgan, J. L., Golinkoff, R. M. & Rathbun, K. (2005). ‘Mommy’ and me: familiar names help launch babies into speech-stream segmentation. Psychological Science 16(4), 298–304.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Chomsky, N. (2011). Language and other cognitive systems. What is special about language? Language Learning and Development 7(4), 263–78.Google Scholar
Colombo, J. & Bundy, R. S. (1983). Infant response to auditory familiarity and novelty. Infant Behavior and Development 6(2), 305–11.Google Scholar
Condry, K. F. & Spelke, E. S. (2008). The development of language and abstract concepts: the case of natural number. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 137(1), 22–38.Google Scholar
Csibra, G. & Gergely, G. (2006). Social learning and social cognition: the case for pedagogy. In Munakata, Y. & Johnson, M. H. (eds), Processes of change in brain and cognitive development: attention and performance XXI, 249–74. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Csibra, G. & Gergely, G. (2009). Natural pedagogy. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 13(4), 148–53.Google Scholar
Csibra, G. & Shamsudheen, R. (2015). Nonverbal generics: human infants interpret objects as symbols of object kinds. Annual Review of Psychology 66(1), 689–710.Google Scholar
Dawson, C. & Gerken, L. (2009). From domain-generality to domain-sensitivity: 4-month-olds learn an abstract repetition rule in music that 7-month-olds do not. Cognition 111(3), 378–82.Google Scholar
Deng, W. & Sloutsky, V. M. (2012). Carrot eaters or moving heads: inductive inference is better supported by salient features than by category labels. Psychological Science 23(2), 178–86.Google Scholar
Dewar, K. & Xu, F. (2007). Do 9-month-old infants expect distinct words to refer to kinds? Developmental Psychology 43(5), 1227–38.Google Scholar
Dewar, K. & Xu, F. (2009). Do early nouns refer to kinds or distinct shapes? Evidence from 10-month-old infants. Psychological Science 20(2), 252–7.Google Scholar
Diesendruck, G. (2003). Categories for names or names for categories? The interplay between domain-specific conceptual structure and language. Language and Cognitive Processes 18(5/6), 759–87.Google Scholar
Eimas, P. D. & Quinn, P. C. (1994). Studies on the formation of perceptually based basic-level categories in young infants. Child Development 65(3), 903–17.Google Scholar
Fantz, R. L. (1963). Pattern vision in newborn infants. Science 140(3564), 296–7.Google Scholar
Farroni, T., Johnson, M. H., Menon, E., Zulian, L., Faraguna, D. & Csibra, G. (2005). Newborns’ preference for face-relevant stimuli: effects of contrast polarity. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 102(47), 17245–50.Google Scholar
Fausey, C. M. & Boroditsky, L. (2008). English and Spanish speakers remember causal agents differently. In B. C. Love, K. McRae & V. M. Sloutsky (eds), Proceedings of the 30th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 205–210). Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society.Google Scholar
Feigenson, L. & Halberda, J. (2008). Conceptual knowledge increases infants’ memory capacity. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 105(29), 9926–30.Google Scholar
Fennell, C. T. & Waxman, S. R. (2010). What paradox? Referential cues allow for infant use of phonetic detail in word learning. Child Development 81(5), 1376–83.Google Scholar
Fenson, L., Dale, P. S., Reznick, J. S., Thal, D., Bates, E., Hartung, J. & Reilly, J. (1993). The MacArthur Communicative Development Inventories: user's guide and technical manual. San Diego, CA: Singular Publishing Group.Google Scholar
Ferguson, B., Havy, M. & Waxman, S. R. (2015). The precision of 12-month-old infants’ link between language and categorization predicts vocabulary size at 12 and 18 months. Frontiers in Psychology, 6, online: <http://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.01319>.CrossRef.>Google Scholar
Ferguson, B. & Lew-Williams, C. (2016). Communicative signals support abstract rule learning by 7-month-old infants. Scientific Reports, 6, online: <http://doi.org/10.1038/srep25434>.CrossRef.>Google Scholar
Ferguson, B. & Waxman, S. R. (2016). What the [beep]? Six-month-olds link novel communicative signals to meaning. Cognition 146(C), 185–9.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Ferry, A. L., Hespos, S. J. & Waxman, S. R. (2010). Categorization in 3- and 4-month-old infants: an advantage of words over tones. Child Development 81(2), 472–9.Google Scholar
Ferry, A. L., Hespos, S. J. & Waxman, S. R. (2013). Nonhuman primate vocalizations support categorization in very young human infants. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 110(38), 15231–35.Google Scholar
Fisher, C., Gertner, Y., Scott, R. M. & Yuan, S. (2010). Syntactic bootstrapping. Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Cognitive Science 1, 143–9.Google ScholarPubMed
Frank, M. C., Braginsky, M. & Yurovsky, D. (2016). Wordbank: an open repository for developmental vocabulary data. Journal of Child Language, online: <http://doi.org/10.1017/s0305000916000209>.CrossRef.>Google Scholar
Frank, M. C., Everett, D. L., Fedorenko, E. & Gibson, E. (2008). Number as a cognitive technology: evidence from Pirahã language and cognition. Cognition 108(3), 819–24.Google Scholar
Fulkerson, A. L. & Haaf, R. A. (2006). Does object naming aid 12-month-olds’ formation of novel object categories? First Language 26(4), 347–61.Google Scholar
Fulkerson, A. L. & Waxman, S. R. (2007). Words (but not tones) facilitate object categorization: evidence from 6- and 12-month-olds. Cognition 105(1), 218–28.Google Scholar
Futó, J., Téglás, E., Csibra, G. & Gergely, G. (2010). Communicative function demonstration induces kind-based artifact representation in preverbal infants. Cognition 117(1), 1–8.Google Scholar
Gelman, S. A. & Heyman, G. D. (1999). Carrot-eaters and creature-believers: the effects of lexicalization on children's inferences about social categories. Psychological Science 10(6), 489–93.Google Scholar
Gentner, D. & Goldin-Meadow, S. (2003). Whither Whorf. In Language in mind: advances in the study of language and thought, 3–14. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Gershkoff-Stowe, L., Thal, D. J., Smith, L. B. & Namy, L. L. (1997). Categorization and its developmental relation to early language. Child Development 68(5), 843–59.Google Scholar
Gleitman, L. R. (1990). The structural sources of verb meanings. Language Acquisition 1(1), 3–55.Google Scholar
Gleitman, L. R. & Papafragou, A. (2005). Language and thought. In Holyoak, K. J. & Morrison, R. G. (eds), The Cambridge handbook of thinking and reasoning, 633–61. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Grossmann, T., Parise, E. & Friederici, A. D. (2010). The detection of communicative signals directed at the self in infant prefrontal cortex. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 4, online: <http://doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2010.00201>..>Google Scholar
Hall, D. G., Veltkamp, B. & Turkel, W. (2004). Children's and adults’ understanding of proper namable things. First Language 24(1), 5–32.Google Scholar
Hernik, M. & Csibra, G. (2015). Infants learn enduring functions of novel tools from action demonstrations. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 130(C), 176–92.Google Scholar
Hollich, G., Hirsh-Pasek, K. & Golinkoff, R. M. (2000). Breaking the language barrier: an emergentist coalition model for the origins of word learning. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development 65(3), 1–123.Google Scholar
Höhle, B., Weissenborn, J., Kiefer, D. & Schulz, A. (2004). Functional elements in infants’ speech processing: the role of determiners in the syntactic categorization of lexical elements. Infancy 5(3), 341–53.Google Scholar
Imai, M. & Gentner, D. (1997). A cross-linguistic study of early word meaning: universal ontology and linguistic influence. Cognition 62(2), 169–200.Google Scholar
Johnson, J. S. & Newport, E. L. (1989). Critical period effects in second language learning: the influence of maturational state on the acquisition of English as a second language. Cognitive Psychology 21(1), 60–99.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Jusczyk, P. W. & Aslin, R. N. (1995). Infants’ detection of the sound patterns of words in fluent speech. Infant Pathways to Language:, Methods, Models and Research Directions 29(1), 1–23.Google Scholar
Keates, J. & Graham, S. A. (2008). Category markers or attributes: Why do labels guide infants’ inductive inferences? Psychological Science 19(12), 1287–93.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Klibanoff, R. S. & Waxman, S. R. (2000). Basic level object categories support the acquisition of novel adjectives: evidence from preschool-aged children. Child Development 71(3), 649–59.Google Scholar
Krehm, M., Onishi, K. H. & Vouloumanos, A. (2014). I see your point: infants under 12 months understand that pointing is communicative. Journal of Cognition and Development 15(4), 527–38.Google Scholar
Krentz, U. C. & Corina, D. P. (2008). Preference for language in early infancy: the human language bias is not speech specific. Developmental Science 11(1), 1–9.Google Scholar
Kuhl, P. K., Tsao, F. M. & Liu, H. M. (2003). Foreign-language experience in infancy: effects of short-term exposure and social interaction on phonetic learning. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 100(15), 9096–101.Google Scholar
Landau, B. & Shipley, E. (2001). Labelling patterns and object naming. Developmental Science 4(1), 109–18.Google Scholar
Lewkowicz, D. J. (1988a). Sensory dominance in infants: I. Six-month-old infants’ response to auditory-visual compounds. Developmental Psychology 24(2), 155–71.Google Scholar
Lewkowicz, D. J. (1988b). Sensory dominance in infants: II. Ten-month-old infants’ response to auditory-visual compounds. Developmental Psychology 24(2), 172–82.Google Scholar
Liszkowski, U. & Carpenter, M. (2007). Pointing out new news, old news, and absent referents at 12 months of age. Developmental Science 10(2), F1–7.Google Scholar
Lewkowicz, D. J. & Ghazanfar, A. A. (2009). The emergence of multisensory systems through perceptual narrowing. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 13(11), 470–8.Google Scholar
Lloyd-Fox, S., Széplaki-Köllőd, B., Yin, J. & Csibra, G. (2015). Are you talking to me? Neural activations in 6-month-old infants in response to being addressed during natural interactions. Cortex 70, 35–48.Google Scholar
Lupyan, G. (2008). The conceptual grouping effect: categories matter (and named categories matter more). Cognition 108(2), 566–77.Google Scholar
Lupyan, G., Rakison, D. H. & McClelland, J. L. (2007). Language is not just for talking: redundant labels facilitate learning of novel categories. Psychological Science 18(12), 1077–83.Google Scholar
Mandler, J. M. & McDonough, L. (1993). Concept formation in infancy. Cognitive Development 8(3), 291–318.Google Scholar
Marcus, G. F., Fernandes, K. J. & Johnson, S. P. (2007). Infant rule learning facilitated by speech. Psychological Science 18(5), 387–91.Google Scholar
Marcus, G. F., Fernandes, K. J. & Johnson, S. P. (2012). The role of association in early word-learning. Frontiers in Psychology, 3, 283, online: <http://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2012.00283>..>Google Scholar
Mareschal, D. & Quinn, P. C. (2001). Categorization in infancy. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 5(10), 443–50.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Marno, H., Davelaar, E. J. & Csibra, G. (2014). Nonverbal communicative signals modulate attention to object properties. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance 40(2), 752–62.Google Scholar
Marno, H., Davelaar, E. J. & Csibra, G. (2016). An object memory bias induced by communicative reference. Acta Psychologica , 163(C) 88–96.Google Scholar
Maurer, D. & Werker, J. F. (2013). Perceptual narrowing during infancy: a comparison of language and faces. Developmental Psychobiology 56(2), 154–78.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
May, L. & Werker, J. F. (2014). Can a click be a word? Infants’ learning of non-native words. Infancy 19(3), 281–300.Google Scholar
Mervis, C. B. & Rosch, E. (1981). Categorization of natural objects. Annual Review of Psychology 32, 89–115.Google Scholar
Mintz, T. H. (2003). Frequent frames as a cue for grammatical categories in child directed speech. Cognition 90(1), 91–117.Google Scholar
Murphy, G. L. (1990). Noun phrase interpretation and conceptual combination. Journal of Memory and Language 29(3), 259–88.Google Scholar
Murphy, G. L. (2004). The big book of concepts. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Namy, L. L. & Waxman, S. R. (2000). Naming and exclaiming: infants’ sensitivity to naming contexts. Journal of Cognition and Development 1(4), 405–28.Google Scholar
Namy, L. L. & Waxman, S. R. (2005). Symbols redefined. In Namy, L. L. (ed.), Symbol use and symbolic representation, 269–78. Malwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.Google Scholar
Palmer, S. B., Fais, L., Golinkoff, R. M. & Werker, J. F. (2012). Perceptual narrowing of linguistic sign occurs in the 1st year of life. Child Development 83(2), 543–53.Google Scholar
Parise, E. & Csibra, G. (2013). Neural responses to multimodal ostensive signals in 5-month-old infants. PLoS ONE 8(8), 7.Google Scholar
Pascalis, O., Loevenbruck, H., Quinn, P. C., Kandel, S., Tanaka, J. W. & Lee, K. (2014). On the links among face processing, language processing, and narrowing during development. Child Development Perspectives 8(2), 65–70.Google Scholar
Peirce, C. S. (1932). Collected papers, (eds.), Hartshorne, C. & Weiss, P.. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Perszyk, D., Ferguson, B. & Waxman, S. (in press). Maturation constrains the effect of experience in linking language and cognition: evidence from healthy preterm infants. Developmental Science.Google Scholar
Pinker, S. (2007). The stuff of thought: language as a window into human nature. New York, NY: Viking Press.Google Scholar
Pinker, S. & Jackendoff, R. (2005). The faculty of language: What's special about it? Cognition 95(2), 201–36.Google Scholar
Plunkett, K. (2008). Labels can override perceptual categories in early infancy. Cognition 106(2), 665–81.Google Scholar
Quinn, P. C., Lee, K., Pascalis, O. & Tanaka, J. W. (2015). Narrowing in categorical responding to other-race face classes by infants. Developmental Science 19(3), 362–71.Google Scholar
Reeb-Sutherland, B. C., Fifer, W. P., Byrd, D. L., Hammock, E. A. D., Levitt, P. & Fox, N. A. (2011). One-month-old human infants learn about the social world while they sleep. Developmental Science 14(5), 1134–41.Google Scholar
Robinson, C. W., Best, C. A., Deng, W. & Sloutsky, V. M. (2012). The role of words in cognitive tasks: What, when, and how? Frontiers in Psychology 3(95), 1–8, online: <http://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2012.00095>.Google Scholar
Robinson, C. W. & Sloutsky, V. M. (2007a). Linguistic labels and categorization in infancy: Do labels facilitate or hinder? Infancy 11(3), 233–53.Google Scholar
Robinson, C. W. & Sloutsky, V. M. (2007b). Visual processing speed: effects of auditory input on visual processing. Developmental Science 10(6), 734–40.Google Scholar
Scott, L. S. & Monesson, A. (2009). The origin of biases in face perception. Psychological Science 20(6), 676–80.Google Scholar
Scott, L. S. & Monesson, A. (2010). Experience-dependent neural specialization during infancy. Neuropsychologia 48(6), 1857–61.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Seidl, A., Tincoff, R., Baker, C. & Cristia, A. (2015). Why the body comes first: effects of experimenter touch on infants’ word finding. Developmental Science 18(1), 155–64.Google Scholar
Shi, R. (2014). Functional morphemes and early language acquisition. Child Development Perspectives 8(1), 6–11.Google Scholar
Shultz, S. & Vouloumanos, A. (2010). Three-month-olds prefer speech to other naturally occurring signals. Language Learning and Development 6(4), 241–57.Google Scholar
Shultz, S., Vouloumanos, A., Bennett, R. H. & Pelphrey, K. (2014). Neural specialization for speech in the first months of life. Developmental Science 17(5), 766–74.Google Scholar
Sloman, S. A., Malt, B. C. & Fridman, A. (2001). Categorization versus similarity: the case of container names. In Hahn, U. & Ramscar, M. (eds), Similarity and categorization, 73–86. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sloutsky, V. M. (2010). From perceptual categories to concepts: What develops? Cognitive Science 34(7), 1244–86.Google Scholar
Sloutsky, V. M. & Fisher, A. V. (2004). Induction and categorization in young children: a similarity-based model. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 133(2), 166–88.Google Scholar
Sloutsky, V. M. & Fisher, A. V. (2012). Linguistic labels: Conceptual markers or object features? Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 111(1), 65–86.Google Scholar
Sloutsky, V. M. & Robinson, C. W. (2008). The role of words and sounds in infants’ visual processing: from overshadowing to attentional tuning. Cognitive Science 32(2), 342–65.Google Scholar
Smith, E. E. & Medin, D. L. (1981). Categories and concepts. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Smith, L. B. (2000). Avoiding associations when it's behaviorism you really hate. In Golinkoff, R. M. & Hirsh-Pasek, K. (eds), Becoming a word learner: a debate on lexical acquisition, 169–74. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Smith., L. B. & Heise, D. (1992). Perceptual similarity and conceptual structure. In Bums, B. (ed.), Advances in psychology–percepts, concepts, and categories: the representation and processing of information, 233–72. Amsterdam: Elsevier.Google Scholar
Spelke, E. S. & Kestenbaum, R. (1986). Les origines du concept d'objet. Psychologie Française 31, 67–72.Google Scholar
Syrett, K., Arunachalam, S. & Waxman, S. R. (2013). Slowly but surely: adverbs support verb learning in 2-year-olds. Language Learning and Development 10(3), 263–78.Google Scholar
Tincoff, R. & Jusczyk, P. W. (1999). Some beginnings of word comprehension in 6-month-olds. Psychological Science 10(2), 172–5.Google Scholar
Tincoff, R. & Jusczyk, P. W. (2012). Six-month-olds comprehend words that refer to parts of the body. Infancy 17(4), 432–44.Google Scholar
Tomasello, M. (2000). The cultural origins of human cognition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Tomasello, M. & Kruger, A. C. (1992). Joint attention on actions: acquiring verbs in ostensive and non-ostensive contexts. Journal of Child Language 19(2), 311–33.Google Scholar
Valenza, E., Simion, F. & Cassia, V. M. (1996). Face preference at birth. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance 22(4), 892–903.Google Scholar
Vouloumanos, A. & Waxman, S. R. (2014). Listen up! Speech is for thinking during infancy. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 18(12), 642–6.Google Scholar
Vouloumanos, A., Hauser, M. D., Werker, J. F. & Martin, A. (2010). The tuning of human neonates’ preference for speech. Child Development 81(2), 517–27.Google Scholar
Vouloumanos, A., Martin, A. & Onishi, K. H. (2014). Do 6-month-olds understand that speech can communicate? Developmental Science 17(6), 872–9.Google Scholar
Vouloumanos, A., Onishi, K. H. & Pogue, A. (2012). Twelve-month-old infants recognize that speech can communicate unobservable intentions. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 109(32), 12933–37.Google Scholar
Vouloumanos, A. & Werker, J. F. (2004). Tuned to the signal: the privileged status of speech for young infants. Developmental Science 7(3), 270–6.Google Scholar
Vouloumanos, A. & Werker, J. F. (2007). Listening to language at birth: evidence for a bias for speech in neonates. Developmental Science 10(2), 159–64.Google Scholar
Vygotsky, L. S. (1962). Thought and language. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Waxman, S. R. (1999a). Specifying the scope of 13-month-olds’ expectations for novel words. Cognition 70(3), B35–50.Google Scholar
Waxman, S. R. (1999b). The dubbing ceremony revisited: object naming and categorization in infancy and early childhood. In Medin, D. L. & Atran, S. (eds), Folkbiology, 233–84. Cambridge, MA: Bradford.Google Scholar
Waxman, S. R. (2002). Early word learning and conceptual development: everything had a name, and each name gave birth to a new thought. In Goswami, U. (ed.), Blackwell handbook of childhood cognitive development, 102–26. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Waxman, S. R. & Booth, A. (2001). Seeing pink elephants: fourteen-month-olds’ interpretations of novel nouns and adjectives. Infant Pathways to Language: Methods, Models and Research Directions 43(3), 217–42.Google Scholar
Waxman, S. R. & Booth, A. (2003). The origins and evolution of links between word learning and conceptual organization: new evidence from 11-month-olds. Developmental Science 6(2), 128–35.Google Scholar
Waxman, S. R. & Braun, I. (2005). Consistent (but not variable) names as invitations to form object categories: new evidence from 12-month-old infants. Cognition 95, B59–68.Google Scholar
Waxman, S. R. & Gelman, S. A. (2009). Early word-learning entails reference, not merely associations. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 13(6), 258–63.Google Scholar
Waxman, S. R. & Hall, D. G. (1993). The development of a linkage between count nouns and object categories: evidence from fifteen- to twenty-one-month-old infants. Child Development 64(4), 1224–41.Google Scholar
Waxman, S. R. & Lidz, J. (2006). Early word learning. In Kuhn, D. & Siegler, R. (eds), Handbook of Child Psychology, 6th ed., Vol. 2, 299–335. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley.Google Scholar
Waxman, S. R., Lidz, J., Braun, I. E. & Lavin, T. (2009). Twenty-four-month-old infants’ interpretations of novel verbs and nouns in dynamic scenes. Infant Pathways to Language: Methods, Models and Research Directions 59(1), 67–95.Google Scholar
Waxman, S. R. & Markow, D. B. (1995). Words as invitations to form categories: evidence from 12- to 13-month-old infants. Infant Pathways to Language: Methods, Models and Research Directions 29(3), 257–302.Google ScholarPubMed
Waxman, S. R. & Markow, D. B. (1998). Object properties and object kind: twenty-one-month-old infants’ extension of novel adjectives. Child Development 69(5), 1313–29.Google Scholar
Weisleder, A. & Waxman, S. R. (2010). What's in the input? Frequent frames in child-directed speech offer distributional cues to grammatical categories in Spanish and English. Journal of Child Language 37(5), 1089–108.Google Scholar
Werker, J. F. & Hensch, T. K. (2015). Critical periods in speech perception: new directions. Annual Review of Psychology 66(1), 173–96.Google Scholar
Werker, J. F. & Tees, R. (1984). Cross-language speech perception: evidence for perceptual reorganization during the first year of life. Infant Behavior and Development 7(1), 49–63.Google Scholar
Winawer, J., Witthoft, N., Frank, M. C., Wu, L., Wade, A. R. & Boroditsky, L. (2007). Russian blues reveal effects of language on color discrimination. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 104(19), 7780–5.Google Scholar
Woodward, A. L. & Hoyne, K. L. (1999). Infants’ learning about words and sounds in relation to objects. Child Development 70(1), 65–77.Google Scholar
Wu, R., Gopnik, A., Richardson, D. C. & Kirkham, N. Z. (2011). Infants learn about objects from statistics and people. Developmental Psychology 47(5), 1220–9.Google Scholar
Xu, F. (2002). The role of language in acquiring object kind concepts in infancy. Cognition 85(3), 223–50.Google Scholar
Xu, F., Cote, M. & Baker, A. (2005). Labeling guides object individuation in 12-month-old infants. Psychological Science 16(5), 372–7.Google Scholar
Yoon, J. M. D., Johnson, M. H. & Csibra, G. (2008). Communication-induced memory biases in preverbal infants, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 105(36), 13690–95.Google Scholar
Yuan, S. & Fisher, C. (2009). ‘Really? He blicked the cat?’: Two-year-olds learn distributional facts about verbs in the absence of a referential context. Psychological Science 20(5), 619–26.Google Scholar
Zosh, J. M., and Feigenson, L. (2009). Beyond ‘what’ and ‘how many’: capacity, complexity and resolution of infants’ object representations. In Santos, L. & Hood, B. (eds.), The origins of object knowledge, 25–51. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar