Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Colour word learning has traditionally been viewed as a diffi-cult task. Previous accounts have focussed on infants’ ability toshow an adult-like understanding of colour terms. Here we ex-amine whether infants understand colour terms at a basic level,using two different methods: first, evidence from parental re-ports that British infants can comprehend colour terms early,second from experimental data using eye-tracking. These find-ing show that colour word learning is a process that beginsmuch earlier than previously thought, and develops slowly asinfants learn where the boundaries of each term are located.Due to their abstract properties, colour words present a uniqueopportunity to assess category learning in infants, as well asthe mechanisms that control word learning in general.