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The Whorfian Infant| old_uid | 6344 |
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| title | The Whorfian Infant |
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| start_date | 2009/02/26 |
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| schedule | 16h |
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| online | no |
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| location_info | salle 236 |
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| summary | I will describe a series of experiments that provides unequivocal support for the view that labels impact the process of categorization in young infants even before they begin to produce their first words, to the extent that labels can override the perceptual dissimilarities between objects and lead infants to treat them as more similar to each other. The experiments also demonstrate that young infants can simultaneously compute the correlational structure of object features in the visual domain at the same time as they compute the relationship of that correlational structure to novel features (words) in the auditory domain. This cross-modal, computational capacity is a powerful tool for the young infant to exploit in deriving the meaning of words.
However, the nature of the underlying mechanisms that enable labels to impact infant categorisation is unclear. Some researchers have suggested that ‘labels facilitate categorisation’, that labels ‘act as invitations to form categories’ and that labels ‘highlight the commonalities between objects’. I consider an alternative explanation that ‘labels are merely additional features that are integrated into the processing of category information’. Computational implementations of these approaches are assessed and the ‘Perceptual Load Hypothesis’ is introduced in an attempt to reconcile competing accounts of cross-modal auditory-visual processing in infancy. |
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| responsibles | <not specified> |
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