News Finding: Cognitive scientists Catarina Vales and Linda Smith say that their findings open up new avenues for research into the way language shapes the course of developmental disabilities such as ADHD, difficulties with school, and other attention-related problems.
Paper Finding: The shape bias in children's noun learning does not just concern the effect of known names on categorization but also the effect of novel names on the categorization -and name generalization of novel things.
News Context: The study, published in Developmental Science, reveals that spoken language -- more so than images -- taps into a child's cognitive system and enhances their ability to learn, as well as to navigate cluttered environments. Cognitive scientists Catarina Vales and Linda Smith say that their findings open up new avenues for research into the way language shapes the course of developmental disabilities such as ADHD, difficulties with school, and other attention-related problems. "If the name of the target object was also said, the children were much faster at finding it and less distracted by the other objects in the scene," Vales, a graduate student in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, said in a recent statement.
Paper Context: The current findings also have implications for understanding why children are more likely to group objects by shape when they are named . The shape bias in children's noun learning does not just concern the effect of known names on categorization but also the effect of novel names on the categorization -and name generalization of novel things. By one account, this shape bias emerges as a secondorder generalization across known names and categories and is cued by the common linguistic contexts of naming things .