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Related Experiment Video

Updated: May 29, 2026

Experience is Instrumental in Tuning a Link Between Language and Cognition: Evidence from 6- to 7- Month-Old Infants' Object Categorization

Experience is Instrumental in Tuning a Link Between Language and Cognition: Evidence from 6- to 7- Month-Old Infants' Object Categorization

Published on: April 19, 2017

Interactions between statistical and semantic information in infant language development.

Jill Lany¹, Jenny R Saffran

¹Department of Psychology, University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, IN 46556, USA. jlany@nd.edu

Developmental Science

|September 3, 2011

Summary

This summary is machine-generated.

Infants learn word categories using statistical cues. Vocabulary size influences whether infants prioritize phonological or distributional cues for word learning and generalization.

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Area of Science:

Developmental Psychology
Cognitive Science
Linguistics

Background:

Infants utilize statistical regularities to establish basic word categories (e.g., noun, verb).
Learning word meanings is facilitated by understanding commonalities within these categories.

Purpose of the Study:

To investigate how distributional and phonological statistical cues influence infant word learning.
To examine the relationship between cue utilization and language proficiency in infants.
To understand the developmental trajectory of cue weighting in word learning.

Main Methods:

Employed an artificial language methodology to assess infant word learning.
Analyzed the differential use of distributional and phonological cues based on computational demands.
Correlated cue usage with vocabulary size in 22-month-old infants.

Main Results:

Infants with smaller vocabularies generalized word meanings using phonological cues.
Infants with larger vocabularies generalized word meanings using distributional cues.
Both cue types contribute to early word category formation and learning.

Conclusions:

Phonological and distributional cues are crucial for infants forming word categories and learning word meanings.
The reliance on specific cues shifts with language development and vocabulary size.
Infants' weighting of statistical cues dynamically changes throughout early language acquisition.