The Nature of Early Word Comprehension: Symbols or Associations?

The Nature of Early Word Comprehension: Symbols or Associations? Christopher W. Robinson (robinson.777@osu.edu) Center for Cognitive Science The Ohio State University 208F Ohio Stadium East, 1961 Tuttle Park Place Columbus, OH 43210, USA Erica M. Howard (howard.432@osu.edu) Center for Cognitive Science The Ohio State University 207D Ohio Stadium East, 1961 Tuttle Park Place Columbus, OH 43210, USA Vladimir M. Sloutsky (sloutsky.1@osu.edu) Center for Cognitive Science The Ohio State University 208C Ohio Stadium East, 1961 Tuttle Park Place Columbus, OH 43210, USA Woodward, Markman, & Fitzsimmons, 1994), and extend these words to other objects in the category (Campbell & Namy, 2003). By 14- to 15-months of age, children can learn words by simply detecting correlations between words and objects in the environment (Schafer & Plunkett, 1998; Werker, Cohen, Lloyd, Casasola, & Stager, 1998), and shortly after, children can fast map words to objects in the environment (Carey & Bartlett, 1978; Markson & Bloom, 1997; see Woodward & Markman, 1998, for a review). Although the developmental changes that occur in early word learning are well documented, the underlying nature of children’s early word comprehension is not fully understood. For example, adults understand that words refer or stand for objects and categories and differ from sounds that they simply go with objects (e.g., a four-legged pet can be substituted by the word dog but not by a barking sound). Do young infants at the onset of word learning understand the referential and symbolic nature of words or are words better understood as features that are associated with objects? From one perspective it has been argued that by 9-months of age children already have assumptions that words but not sounds refer to categories (e.g., Waxman, 2003), and it would be difficult if not impossible for word learning to begin without children making assumptions that words are symbols that refer to objects and categories (e.g., Golinkoff, Mervis, & Hirsh-Pasek, 1994). From a very different perspective, children’s assumptions about words are better understood as features that are associated with objects. In particular, it has been argued that children do not perceive words as symbols or semantic markers, rather, words affect behavior on a variety of cognitive tasks by influencing the overall similarity of compared entities (Sloutsky & Fisher, 2004; Abstract The current study investigated comprehension of object labels in young children. Eight- and 14-month olds were presented with pairs of pictures (e.g., dog and ball) to establish infants’ initial looking preferences and then children heard a linguistic label (e.g., dog). Only 14-month-olds reliably increased looking to the referents after hearing the labels relative to their initial preference, which suggests that 14-month-olds were familiar with the word-object relations used in the current task. When the referent was paired with the source of the auditory information (e.g., dog paired with a person) and children heard a label (e.g., dog), 8-month-olds increased looking to the person relative to their initial preference and 14-month-olds’ comprehension of the word-object relations dropped to chance. These findings are consistent with the notion that children’s early word comprehension is associative in nature and questions whether young children understand the symbolic nature of words. Keywords: Cognitive Development, Attention, Language Acquisition, Psychology, Human Experimentation. Introduction By 6- to 7-months of age, children begin recognizing familiar words embedded within the speech stream (Jusczyk & Aslin, 1995) and around 8-9 months of age infants (according to parental reports) begin associating words with objects in the environment (Fenson, et al., 1994). Although word learning during the first year is often described as a slow and laborious process, children become very efficient at learning words during the second and third years of life. For example, under certain conditions, 12- to 14-month-old children ably associate words with objects (Woodward & Hoyne, 1999;