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...
Most cognitive research on conceptual structure has studied undergraduate populations and either natural (biological) or artificial (experiment-specific) categories. This project investigates how people with extensive, rich knowledge about a complex real-world domain organize and use that knowledge. The research extends prior work on differences among types of experts within biological...
Infants’ initially broad links between language and object categories are increasingly tuned, becoming more precise by the end of their first year. In a longitudinal study, we asked whether individual differences in the precision of infants’ links at 12 months of age are related to vocabulary development. We found that,...