Biomedical subjects
Publications and source records attributed to Susan S Jones.
In a newborn imitation paradigm, an auditory stimulus--music--replaced the standard adult behavioral model. Alternating intervals of music and silence affected 4-week-old infants' rates of tongue protruding--evidence that tongue protruding is a general response to interesting distal stimuli.
Two experiments examined the relation between early object name learning and the ability to represent objects by their abstract shapes. In Experiment 1, two-year-old children with productive vocabularies in the bottom 20th percentile--'late talkers'--were compared with (1) same-age children with larger vocabularies, and (2) younger children matched for productive vocabulary, on their ability to recognize named common objects. Object categories were represented two ways: by lifelike, perceptually rich toys, and by grey caricatures of those objects' abstract shapes. All 3 groups recognized lifelike objects equally well. Both typically-developing control groups were better than late talkers at recognizing shape caricatures of objects whose names they knew. In Experiment 2, late talkers and age-matched controls identified named objects represented by lifelike toys and by duplicates of those toys covered in grey textured paint. Age-matched controls knew more of the object names overall, but both they and the late talkers performed equally well on both kinds of test objects. Thus, late talkers had some difficulty in Experiment 1 recognizing objects from abstract shape cues, but no difficulty in Experiment 2 when the shape cues were realistic. The findings imply a relation between the growth of productive vocabulary and the emergence of the ability to represent object categories by abstract shape.
Booth and Waxman (Cognition 84 (2002) B11) have recently shown that linguistic cues to animacy affect children's novel name extensions. They argue that this demonstration contradicts two central tenets of our attentional learning account of object naming, which Booth and Waxman characterize as the "dumb attentional mechanism" or "DAM" account. In the present article, we show that the first of these tenets has never been a feature of the attentional learning account, and that the second tenet, which is central to our account, is not addressed by Booth and Waxman's findings. We suggest that the debate about the nature of children's language and cognition would profit from an increased awareness of the different levels of analysis at which different researchers are working.
By the age of 3, children easily learn to name new objects, extending new names for unfamiliar objects by similarity in shape. Two experiments tested the proposal that experience in learning object names tunes children's attention to the properties relevant for naming--in the present case, to the property of shape--and thus facilitates the learning of more object names. In Experiment 1, a 9-week longitudinal study, 17-month-old children who repeatedly played with and heard names for members of unfamiliar object categories well organized by shapeformed the generalization that only objects with ith similar shapes have the same name. Trained children also showed a dramatic increase in acquisition of new object names outside of the laboratory during the course of the study. Experiment 2 replicated these findings and showed that they depended on children's learning both a coherent category structure and object names. Thus, children who learn specific names for specific things in categories with a common organizing property--in this case, shape--also learn to attend to just the right property--in this case, shape--for learning more object names.