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Related Concept Videos

Language Development01:22

Language Development

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Children master language quickly and with relative ease, supported by both biological predisposition and reinforcement. B. F. Skinner (1957) proposed that language is learned through reinforcement, while Noam Chomsky (1965) argued that language acquisition mechanisms are biologically determined.
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A variable, usually notated by capital letters such as X and Y, is a characteristic or measurement that can be determined for each member of a population. Data are the actual values of variables. They may be numbers, or they may be words. Datum is a single value.
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The sensorimotor stage, the initial phase of Jean Piaget's theory of cognitive development, spans the first two years of a child's life. During this period, infants actively engage with their surroundings, building cognitive awareness through direct interaction with the world. This interaction is primarily based on sensory perception and motor actions, allowing infants to gradually understand basic physical properties and predict how objects interact within their environment.
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Language serves as a bridge between ideas and communication, influencing how individuals perceive and interact with the world. Psychologists have long debated whether language shapes thought or vice versa. This discussion gained grip with Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf in the 1940s, who proposed that language determines thought, a concept known as linguistic determinism. They suggested that the vocabulary and structure of a language influence how its speakers think and perceive reality.
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Components of Language01:24

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Language, whether spoken, signed, or written, consists of specific components: lexicon and grammar. The lexicon is the vocabulary of a language, comprising its words. Grammar is the set of rules used to convey meaning through the lexicon. For example, English grammar adds “-ed” to most verbs to indicate past tense. Words are formed by combining phonemes, which are the basic sound units of a language. Different languages have different sets of phonemes (e.g., “ah” vs.
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The Nativist Approach01:21

The Nativist Approach

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The nativist approach to infant cognitive development proposes that infants are born with inherent knowledge structures that allow them to interpret the world almost immediately. This perspective contrasts with earlier developmental theories, such as those proposed by Jean Piaget, which emphasized a more gradual acquisition of cognitive abilities through interaction with the environment. One key concept in this approach is object permanence — the understanding that objects continue to...
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Updated: Dec 14, 2025

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

Rushen Shi1, Andréane Melançon1

  • 1Département de Psychologie Université du Québec à Montréal.

Infancy : the Official Journal of the International Society on Infant Studies
|July 23, 2020
PubMed
Summary
This summary is machine-generated.

Fourteen-month-old infants learning French can use determiners to categorize new words as nouns. However, they do not show evidence of using pronouns to categorize words as verbs.

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Area of Science:

  • Developmental Psychology
  • Linguistics
  • Cognitive Science

Background:

  • Infants aged 6-8 months recognize and store function words.
  • Early language acquisition involves understanding grammatical categories.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To investigate if 14-month-old French-learning infants categorize novel words as nouns or verbs using determiners and pronouns.
  • To determine if infants perceive determiners and pronouns as distinct syntactic categories.

Main Methods:

  • A visual fixation procedure was used with 14-month-old infants.
  • Infants were exposed to novel words preceded by either determiners (for nouns) or subject pronouns (for verbs).
  • Prosodic characteristics of novel words were controlled to isolate the effect of function words.

Main Results:

  • Infants treated determiners as a unified class and used them to categorize novel words as nouns.
  • No evidence was found for infants categorizing novel words as verbs using pronouns.
  • Pronouns were not perceived as a common syntactic class by the infants.

Conclusions:

  • 14-month-old infants learning French demonstrate early knowledge of noun syntactic categories signaled by determiners.
  • Infants' ability to use function words for word categorization is asymmetrical, with nouns being easier to categorize than verbs.
  • The findings suggest developmental differences in processing determiners versus pronouns in early language acquisition.