Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Despite substantial evidence for a bidirectional relationshipbetween language and representation, the roots of this relationshipin infancy are not known. The current study explores thepossibility that labels may affect object representations at theearliest stages of language acquisition. We asked parents to playwith their 10-month-old infants with two novel toys for threeminutes, every day for a week, teaching infants a novel word forone toy but not the other. After a week infants participated in afamiliarization task in which they saw each object for 8 trials insilence, followed by a test trial consisting of both objectsaccompanied by the trained word. Infants exhibited a faster declinein looking times to the previously unlabeled object. These dataspeak to the current debate over the status of labels in humancognition, supporting accounts in which labels are an integral partof representation.