TY  - JOUR
A1  - Langus, Alan
A1  - Höhle, Barbara
T1  - Object individuation and labelling in 6-month-old infants
JF  - Infant behavior & development
N2  - 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.
KW  - Object individuation
KW  - Object labelling
KW  - Cognitive development
KW  - Language
KW  - development
Y1  - 2021
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.infbeh.2021.101627
SN  - 0163-6383
SN  - 1879-0453
VL  - 65
PB  - Elsevier
CY  - New York
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Höhle, Barbara
A1  - Bijeljac-Babic, Ranka
A1  - Nazzi, Thierry
T1  - Variability and stability in early language acquisition
BT  - comparing recognition and bilingual infants' speech perception and word recognition
JF  - Bilingualism : language and cognition
N2  - Many human infants grow up learning more than one language simultaneously but only recently has research started to study early language acquisition in this population more systematically. The paper gives an overview on findings on early language acquisition in bilingual infants during the first two years of life and compares these findings to current knowledge on early language acquisition in monolingual infants. Given the state of the research, the overview focuses on research on phonological and early lexical development in the first two years of life. We will show that the developmental trajectory of early language acquisition in these areas is very similar in mono- and bilingual infants suggesting that these early steps into language are guided by mechanisms that are rather robust against the differences in the conditions of language exposure that mono- and bilingual infants typically experience.
KW  - language acquisition
KW  - bilingual infants
KW  - bilingual phonological
KW  - development
KW  - bilingual lexical development
KW  - simultaneous bilingualism
Y1  - 2019
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1017/S1366728919000348
SN  - 1366-7289
SN  - 1469-1841
VL  - 23
IS  - 1
SP  - 56
EP  - 71
PB  - Cambridge Univ. Press
CY  - New York
ER  -