It is known that infants are aware of the category of objects in daily life before explicit vocabulary acquisition starts. It has been suggested that the ability of categorization is likely to play an essential role in its overall cognitive development. In this study, we conducted a series of experiments using stimuli that have various attributes in order to understand the process of such a categorization in an infant's pre-linguistic development. We consider two possible cognitive processes of linguistic categorization. One possible scenario is that certain members of the categories are derived from similarity with the most representative members of a category (prototypical members). Alternatively, the coupling of each category member- ship with relevant labels can be traced to the symbol grounding problem. Our results are consistent with an interpretation that the cortical systems involved in language development is inseparably linked with prototype effects in categorization.
Cite as: Sudo, T., Mogi, K. (2005) Perceptual and linguistic category formation in infants. Proc. Interspeech 2005, 1185-1188, doi: 10.21437/Interspeech.2005-474
@inproceedings{sudo05_interspeech,
author={Tamami Sudo and Ken Mogi},
title={{Perceptual and linguistic category formation in infants}},
year=2005,
booktitle={Proc. Interspeech 2005},
pages={1185--1188},
doi={10.21437/Interspeech.2005-474}
}