ERIC Number: EJ1122618
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2017-Jan
Pages: 16
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-0305-0009
EISSN: N/A
Fourteen-Month-Olds' Decontextualized Understanding of Words for Absent Objects
Hendrickson, Kristi; Sundara, Megha
Journal of Child Language, v44 n1 p239-254 Jan 2017
The majority of research examining infants' decontextualized word knowledge comes from studies in which words and pictures are presented simultaneously. However, comprehending utterances about unseen objects is a hallmark of language. Do infants demonstrate decontextualized absent object knowledge early in the second year of life? Further, to what extent do words evoke strictly prototypical representations of absent objects? To investigate these questions we analyzed 14-month-olds' comprehension of labels for absent entities without contextual support. In a novel, auditory-visual priming paradigm, infants heard passages containing two target words and then saw four animations--two that matched the meaning of the target words and two they had not heard in the passages. We found that by age 1;2, spoken words evoke prototypical representations of absent entities. Additionally, our findings demonstrate a promising new method for exploring absent object comprehension in infants.
Descriptors: Infants, Vocabulary Development, Comprehension, Identification, Auditory Stimuli, Visual Stimuli, Priming, Animation, Oral Language
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Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Research
Education Level: N/A
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A