Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

A large literature shows that language influences cognition.Yet, we know very little about when and how linguisticinfluences on cognition become important in development.Here we test the proposal that one pathway by whichlanguage affects cognition is by activating categoryinformation which influences visual processing, and that thisinfluence starts early. Across two experiments, we show thatcategory information affects visual processing and that wordscan activate category information in young children.