Elena Luchkina, Sandra Waxman Northwestern University
A fundamental feature of human languages is that they permit us to call to mind objects, events, and ideas that we cannot witness directly. This capacity rests upon the referential status of words ¬– a link between words and mental representations of their referents. When do infants achieve this recognition and what measure would suggest that infants have established a robust link between words and mental representations? To address these questions, we leveraged infants’ sensitivity to semantic priming and evaluated infants’ ability to learn the name of an object while it was not visible. Fifteen-month-olds watched an actor who first named three familiar visible objects and then ostensibly looked toward and labeled a non-visible object (“A modi!”). In the Priming condition (N=24) all familiar objects were from the same semantic neighborhood (e.g., three fruits). During test, a novel object from the same semantic neighborhood and a semantically distant object were presented. Infants were prompted to look at the object corresponding to the newly learned word (“Find the modi”). In the No Priming condition (N=24) familiar objects were semantically distant from each other. Our results indicate that only in the Priming condition, the presentation of familiar word-object pairs enabled infants to constrain the range of possible referents of the novel word to items in the same semantic neighborhood. This suggests that 15-month-olds are capable of mapping words onto mental representations and might indeed be using semantic neighborhood priming to create such representations in the absence of a novel word referent.
