Conceptual precursors to language.
Because human languages vary in sound and meaning, children must learn which distinctions their language uses. For speech perception, this learning is selective: initially infants are sensitive to most acoustic distinctions used in any language, and this sensitivity reflects basic properties of the auditory system rather than mechanisms specific to language; however, infants' sensitivity to non-native sound distinctions declines over the course of the first year. Here we ask whether a similar process governs learning of word meanings. We investigated the sensitivity of 5-month-old infants in an English-speaking environment to a conceptual distinction that is marked in Korean but not English; that is, the distinction between 'tight' and 'loose' fit of one object to another. Like adult Korean speakers but unlike adult English speakers, these infants detected this distinction and divided a continuum of motion-into-contact actions into tight- and loose-fit categories. Infants' sensitivity to this distinction is linked to representations of object mechanics that are shared by non-human animals. Language learning therefore seems to develop by linking linguistic forms to universal, pre-existing representations of sound and meaning.
Department of Psychology and Human Development, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee 37203, USA. s.hespos@vanderbilt.edu
Susan J
SJ
Hespos
Elizabeth S
ES
Spelke
D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D003071:Cognition / Q000502:physiology*; D004739:England; D006185:Habituation, Psychophysiologic / Q000502:physiology; D006801:Humans; D007223:Infant; D007723:Korea; D007802:Language; D007858:Learning / Q000502:physiology*; D012660:Semantics; D013997:Time Factors; D014825:Vocabulary