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Related Experiment Video

Updated: May 2, 2026

Portable Intermodal Preferential Looking IPL: Investigating Language Comprehension in Typically Developing Toddlers and Young Children with Autism

Portable Intermodal Preferential Looking IPL: Investigating Language Comprehension in Typically Developing Toddlers and Young Children with Autism

Published on: December 14, 2012

Implicit meaning in 18-month-old toddlers.

Claire Delle Luche¹, Samantha Durrant, Caroline Floccia

¹School of Psychology, Plymouth University, UK.

Developmental Science

|March 18, 2014

Summary

This summary is machine-generated.

Eighteen-month-old infants can understand word meanings without visual cues and recognize semantic relationships between words. This suggests early development of a word meaning system in infants.

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Last Updated: May 2, 2026

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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

Area of Science:

Developmental Psychology
Linguistics
Cognitive Science

Background:

Infants understand spoken words by 6 months, but their ability to grasp meaning without visual context is less understood.
Understanding words without visual referents could indicate symbolic interpretation and language-based thought.

Purpose of the Study:

To investigate if 18-month-old infants can derive implicit word meanings from auditory information alone.
To determine if infants are sensitive to semantic relationships between words.

Main Methods:

Utilized the head-turn preference procedure to measure infant listening times.
Presented infants with word lists from either the same taxonomic category or mixed categories.

Main Results:

Infants showed longer listening times when presented with words from related categories compared to mixed categories.
This indicates infants extract word meanings and perceive semantic relatedness.

Conclusions:

Infants at 18 months begin building a semantic system based on taxonomic relations.
This occurs before the significant acceleration in vocabulary acquisition.