202008.06
When do infants acquire abstract concepts? (paper publication)
Posted in RESEARCH
Infants can learn semantic concepts even at the stage that they cannot speak a language. However, it remains unclear when and how they acquire such concepts. To clarify this, we conducted a novelty-preference task with 4- to 11-month-old infants, using toys with a uniform texture. The results indicate that 7-month or older infants show ability to classify toys both at the living/non-living category level and at superordinate category levels (animals, plants, tools and vehicles). It is also shown that a part of the categorical preferences correlates with the score of a pre-linguistic questionnaire. This study has been published in Frontiers in Psychology. (Tanabe) https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.02009/full
Infants can learn semantic concepts even at the stage that they cannot speak a language. However, it remains unclear when and how they acquire such concepts. To clarify this, we conducted a novelty-preference task with 4- to 11-month-old infants, using toys with a uniform texture. The results indicate that 7-month or older infants show ability to classify toys both at the living/non-living category level and at superordinate category levels (animals, plants, tools and vehicles). It is also shown that a part of the categorical preferences correlates with the score of a pre-linguistic questionnaire. This study has been published in Frontiers in Psychology. (Tanabe)
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.02009/full