Article summary with Linking language and cognition in infancy by Perszyk & Waxman - 2018

How do one year old infants link words and object categories?

Behavioral paradigm research shows that one year old infants can successfully cull novel words from the ongoing stream of speech, track whether the same or different words have been applied to a set of objects, and expect that a series of distinct objects named consistently with the same word share commonalities. Naming a set of distinct objects with the same name highlights commonalities among them. These commonalities go unnoticed in the absence of naming.

How is learning words related to learning to categorize?

To learn the meaning of a word, a person must identify a portion of the ongoing stream of speech, identify a referent for that word, and establish a mapping between the word and its referent. As infants grow up, they learn distinct words and distinct kinds of words, and they learn that distinct kinds of words are linked to distinct categories of underlying meaning.  When identifying two objects as members of the same category, they have to establish their equivalence at a certain level of representation, permitting them to identify new members of the category, and to make inferences about nonobvious properties from one member of the category to another. Any consistently applied novel word highlights a wide range of commonalities, including those that underlie object categories, object properties, and relationships among objects.

What is the noun-category link?

After one year, infants begin to tease apart the nouns from the other grammatical forms and link them specifically to categories of objects. With a noun-category link in place, infants go on to establish precise links for the predicates, including adjectives and verbs. Discovering the meaning of a predicate depends in part upon the nouns that they take as arguments.

What is the core knowledge perspective?

People have hardwired systems for representing objects, navigating in space, tracking numerosity, perceiving causation, and detenting agency, Several of these systems operate within encapsulated modules. The output of a module is encapsulated from informational representation in the cognitive system. Distinct, encapsulated modules are the foundations of core knowledge and serve as building blocks for higher-order cognition. Humans´ representational systems are intertwined with their communication system-language.

According to the core knowledge perspective, how is language the causal force bridging otherwise distinct representations and representational formats?

Human language boosts the representational capacities of core knowledge by translating otherwise encapsulated representations into a shared language-like format. These shared representations make subsequent conceptual advancements possible. Language augments human representations of objects, numbers, and space. As infants learn language, it becomes possible for them to combine otherwise distinct representations and to represent numbers with exactness.

What is the theory of natural pedagogy?

The theory of natural pedagogy tries to capture the effects of a broader set of communicative cues in infancy. The power of language comes partially from its social-communicative status. The effects of language and especially infant-directed speech are on par with the effects of other ostensive social-comunicative cues, including eye gaze and pointing. Human infants are prepared by evolution to favor ostensive information conveyed by a pedagogical partner, to interpret ostensive cues as referential, and to expect that these cues signal kind-relevant and generalizable information.

How do infants tune their perceptual systems to the auditory and visual signals of our species?

Early perceptual capacities start out broad at birth and are then rapidly tuned in response to infants´ postnatal experience. The process of perceptual narrowing is a domain-general one and it is the same fundamental learning processes that guide infants´ tuning within and across modalities. At birth, infants´ perceptual preferences and capacities are in the auditory domain are broad, but within the first year, their perception of native language sounds becomes sharpened, while their perception of nonnative language and nonhuman primate sounds decreases. Perceptual narrowing is guided by experience and infants´ maturational status (for example rhythmic and phonemic perception).

Which two routes are identified for tuning the language-cognition link in infants?

In the first six months of an infants´ life there may be at least two routes by which they forge a connection between communicative signals and core cognitive capacities (like categorization and abstract rule learning):

• Tuning initially privileged signals. Infants´ experience with the signals in their ambient environments together with their maturational state, guides them as they forge increasingly precise links between the sounds they hear and the core cognitive processes that will serve as foundations of meaning.
• Establishing new links for signals that fall outside infants´ initial template. Infants can create a new link between nonlinguistic signal and cognition, but only if the signal is embedded within a rich social-communicative exchange.