International Centre for Language and Communicative Development: Beyond Words: Infants' Early Category Representations Are Shaped by Labels, 2014-2019

In the current study, parents read their infants a storybook containing multiple exemplars from two novel object categories twice a day, every day for a week. Importantly, one category was labelled while the other was not. After the training week, infants took part in a hybrid familiarization / preferential looking task. In the familiarization phase, infants saw individual images of the trained objects presented in silence. Here, we hypothesized that if shared labels render category structure more similar, looking times to the labeled and unlabeled objects should differ in these silent trials. In the preferential looking phase, infants saw the objects presented side-by-side and heard the trained label.