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.本研究中，家长每日为婴幼儿朗读一本故事书，该书包含来自两个全新物体类别的多个样例，每日朗读两次，持续一周。值得注意的是，其中一个类别被赋予了专属标签，另一个类别则未被标注。为期一周的训练结束后，婴幼儿参与了一项混合熟悉化-优先注视任务（hybrid familiarization / preferential looking task）。在熟悉化阶段，婴幼儿会在无音效的情境下观看训练所用物体的单张图像。本研究提出如下假设：若共享标签使得类别结构更为相似，那么在上述无音效试次中，婴幼儿对带标签物体与无标签物体的注视时长应当存在差异。在优先注视阶段，婴幼儿会看到并排呈现的目标物体，并听到训练阶段使用的对应标签。