Language is a hallmark of human cognition—a rich and flexible method of representing the world around us. As such, language provides an invaluable resource to human infants: a way of gaining insight into the representations that guide adult cognition. In this dissertation, I explore how language influences infants’ cognition as they learn to represent both individual objects and the categories that unite them. In Chapter I, I ask whether and how noun labels can facilitate infants’ categorization—even when those labels occur infrequently, as they inevitably will in infants’ everyday lives. These findings provide the first evidence that infants engage in “semi-supervised learning” by 2 years of age, successfully integrating a few labeled exemplars with a larger set of unlabeled exemplars to learn a new category. In Chapter II, I test the limits of infants’ semi-supervised learning capacities, demonstrating robust semi-supervised learning across a variety of more challenging learning environments. Infants’ successful use of semi-supervised learning in these studies suggests that even when labels are rare, they exert a powerful influence on infants’ category learning. Finally, in Chapter III, I examine language’s influence on object representations using a new recognition memory task. I demonstrate that by 12 months, consistent labels focus infants on commonalities among objects, facilitating categorization but impairing infants’ recognition of the individual objects. In contrast, distinct labels focus infants on each object’s unique features, facilitating recognition of the labeled objects. Thus, 12-month-old infants use language to guide how they encode and remember individuals. Together, these results reveal a flexible, fast, and powerful link between language and cognition in infancy.

Creator

• LaTourrette, Alexander Scott

DOI

• https://doi.org/10.21985/n2-457p-rx81

Subject

• Cognitive psychology

Language

• en

Alternate Identifier

• etdadmin_upload_732252
• http://dissertations.umi.com/northwestern:15046

Keyword

• categorization
• development
• language
• infant
• learning
• cognition

Date created

• 2020-01-01

Resource type

• Dissertation

Rights statement

• In Copyright