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Updated: May 28, 2025
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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
Published on: April 19, 2017
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Discourse referents in infancy
1Department of Cognitive and Psychological Sciences, Brown University.
Psychological Review
|February 10, 2025
Summary
Human infants link words to objects using "discourse referents," representations tied to communication, not just perception. This allows understanding "entities under discussion" even when not visible.
Area of Science:
- Cognitive Science
- Developmental Psychology
- Linguistics
Background:
- Human infants develop the ability to connect conceptual descriptions with objects within their first year.
- Understanding the cognitive mechanisms underlying this early language-object association is crucial for developmental research.
Purpose of the Study:
- To explore the cognitive architecture enabling infants to link conceptual descriptions to objects.
- To propose and investigate the role of "discourse referents" as a key representational format in early communication.
Main Methods:
- Reviewing evidence from developmental psychology to establish criteria for infant discourse referents.
- Analyzing infant cognitive capacities for representing entities within communicative contexts.
Main Results:
- Infants create representations of entities within communicative episodes, encoded from a shared discourse perspective.
- These representations can persist even when entities are perceptually unavailable or displaced.
Conclusions:
- Infants can represent "entities under discussion," not just "entities at locations."
- Early conceptual descriptions are primarily elicited by and applied to these discourse-based representations.
- Successful referential communication involves aligning perceptual object representations with discourse referents.
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