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Updated: Jan 6, 2026

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
The temporal distribution of speech to infants highlights relatedness among words
Lillian R Masek1, Catalina Suarez-Rivera1, Ori Ossmy2
1Department of Applied Psychology, New York University.
Abstract:
Categories are fundamental to cognition. By age 2, infants form categories-animals, foods, and so on-and leverage them to learn new words. What enables them to do so? Prior work has focused on mechanisms internal to infants (e.g., core concepts and biases) and perceptual features of stimuli that facilitate learning (e.g., shape). Here we test the hypothesis that a key property of language input itself-the timing of words to infants-provides a reliable structure that informs on the semantic connections among words. We quantified the temporal structure of infants' speech exposure from video recordings of infant-mother interactions (N = 78) during 1-2 hr of everyday activities (130 cumulative hours). Analysis of time-locked transcriptions yielded 1 billion+ latencies among 350,000+ words. Words from the same superordinate category (i.e., animals, vehicles, food, body parts, and clothing) occurred within a tighter time window relative to one another than did words overall and concrete nouns specifically. Thus, temporal parameters of speech offer reliable data that infants can leverage in the learning of taxonomic categories. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).
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