@article{LangusHoehle2021,
  author    = {Langus, Alan and H{\"o}hle, Barbara},
  title     = {Object individuation and labelling in 6-month-old infants},
  series = {Infant behavior \& development},
  volume    = {65},
  journal   = {Infant behavior \& development},
  publisher = {Elsevier},
  address   = {New York},
  issn      = {0163-6383},
  doi       = {10.1016/j.infbeh.2021.101627},
  pages     = {12},
  year      = {2021},
  abstract  = {The ability to determine how many objects are involved in physical events is fundamental for reasoning about the world that surrounds us. Previous studies suggest that infants can fail to individuate objects in ambiguous occlusion events until their first birthday and that learning words for the objects may play a crucial role in the development of this ability. The present eye-tracking study tested whether the classical object individuation experiments underestimate young infants' ability to individuate objects and the role word learning plays in this process. Three groups of 6-month-old infants (N = 72) saw two opaque boxes side by side on the eye-tracker screen so that the content of the boxes was not visible. During a familiarization phase, two visually identical objects emerged sequentially from one box and two visually different objects from the other box. For one group of infants the familiarization was silent (Visual Only condition). For a second group of infants the objects were accompanied with nonsense words so that objects' shape and linguistic labels indicated the same number of objects in the two boxes (Visual \& Language condition). For the third group of infants, objects' shape and linguistic labels were in conflict (Visual vs. Language condition). Following the familiarization, it was revealed that both boxes contained the same number of objects (e.g. one or two). In the Visual Only condition, infants looked longer to the box with incorrect number of objects at test, showing that they could individuate objects using visual cues alone. In the Visual \& Language condition infants showed the same looking pattern. However, in the Visual vs Language condition infants looked longer to the box with incorrect number of objects according to linguistic labels. The results show that infants can individuate objects in a complex object individuation paradigm considerably earlier than previously thought and that linguistic cues enforce their own preference in object individuation. The results are consistent with the idea that when language and visual information are in conflict, language can exert an influence on how young infants reason about the visual world.},
  language  = {en}
}
@article{HornFritzscheEhlertetal.2021,
  author    = {Horn, Peter and Fritzsche, Tom and Ehlert, Antje and Adani, Flavia},
  title     = {Tapping into the interplay of lexical and number knowledge using fast mapping},
  series = {Infant behavior \& development : an international and interdisciplinary journal},
  volume    = {64},
  journal   = {Infant behavior \& development : an international and interdisciplinary journal},
  publisher = {Elsevier},
  address   = {Amsterdam},
  issn      = {0163-6383},
  doi       = {10.1016/j.infbeh.2021.101573},
  pages     = {11},
  year      = {2021},
  abstract  = {Language skills and mathematical competencies are argued to influence each other during development. While a relation between the development of vocabulary size and mathematical skills is already documented in the literature, this study further examines how children's ability to map a novel word to an unknown object as well as their ability to retain this word from memory may be related to their knowledge of number words. Twenty-five children were tested longitudinally (at 30 and at 36 months of age) using an eye-tracking-based fast mapping task, the Give-a Number task, and standardized measures of vocabulary. The results reveal that children's ability to create and retain a mental representation of a novel word was related to number knowledge at 30 months, but not at 36 months while vocabulary size correlated with number knowledge only at 36 months. These results show that even specific mapping processes are initially related to the acquisition of number words and they speak for a parallelism between the development of lexical and number-concept knowledge despite their semantic and syntactic differences.},
  language  = {en}
}