TY - JOUR
T1 - Object perception and object naming in early development
AU - Landau, Barbara
AU - Smith, Linda
AU - Jones, Susan
N1 - Funding Information:
Preparation of this review was supported by grants RO1 MH-55240 and RO1 HD-28675 from the National Institutes of Health. We gratefully acknowledge the assistance of Andrea Zukowsky in preparing this manuscript.
PY - 1998/1/1
Y1 - 1998/1/1
N2 - Among our most fundamental capacities are those that allow us to perceive, categorize and name objects. Recently, controversy has surrounded the question of how young children learn names for objects, in particular, the relative roles of perception and higher-level world knowledge. It is well known that adults depend strongly on conceptual knowledge in a variety of categorization tasks, including object naming. We argue, however, that perception may play a special role in early object naming and, in particular, that certain kinds of world knowledge known to guide adult naming may come to guide naming only rather late in development. Building early mechanisms of naming on a perceptual foundation that may be encapsulated, and thus shut off from more reflective processes, may explain in part why young children can easily and rapidly learn names for things from the adults around them, despite the fact that adults and children may possess very different conceptual organizations.
AB - Among our most fundamental capacities are those that allow us to perceive, categorize and name objects. Recently, controversy has surrounded the question of how young children learn names for objects, in particular, the relative roles of perception and higher-level world knowledge. It is well known that adults depend strongly on conceptual knowledge in a variety of categorization tasks, including object naming. We argue, however, that perception may play a special role in early object naming and, in particular, that certain kinds of world knowledge known to guide adult naming may come to guide naming only rather late in development. Building early mechanisms of naming on a perceptual foundation that may be encapsulated, and thus shut off from more reflective processes, may explain in part why young children can easily and rapidly learn names for things from the adults around them, despite the fact that adults and children may possess very different conceptual organizations.
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U2 - 10.1016/S1364-6613(97)01111-X
DO - 10.1016/S1364-6613(97)01111-X
M3 - Review article
C2 - 21244958
AN - SCOPUS:0031869677
SN - 1364-6613
VL - 2
SP - 19
EP - 24
JO - Trends in Cognitive Sciences
JF - Trends in Cognitive Sciences
IS - 1
ER -