Building it Better

A essential developmental task facing infants and young children from across the world’s communities is to identify key individuals (e.g., their family pet, a favorite sippy cup), to form concepts that capture commonalities among the individuals they encounter (e.g., dog, cup), and to learn words to express them (e.g., “Magic,” “dog,” “cup”). Th ere is now considerable evidence that even before infants take their fi rst steps, their conceptual and linguistic systems are powerfully linked. What this means is that the concepts infants form are shaped not only by the objects they encounter and events they witness but also by the words that accompany them. Most of the developmental evidence documenting this link between naming and concepts derives from investigations focused on categories of objects (e.g., dog, animal). More recently, researchers have considered the role of language in young children’s categorization and reasoning about people . This work, which has revealed some intriguing parallels that showcase the power of language—and naming in particular—in the early establishment and use of social categories and object categories alike, provides a strong initial footing as we begin to build a bridge that will bring fundamental issues in object categorization into serious contact with issues in social categorization. At the same time, however, it is now apparent that the current blueprint for this bridge is far too narrow. If we are to build a bridge that is sufficiently strong to describe, predict, and explain the development of social categories like those based on race, ethnicity, or gender; how these are shaped by experience; and how they gain inductive force, it is essential that we broaden its footings to include infants and young children raised in a more diverse set of circumstances that reflect more fully the range of human social experience. WO R D S A N D O B J E C T CAT E G O R I E S Th e developmental evidence on naming and object categorization reveals that from infancy, naming has powerful conceptual consequences (see Waxman and Gelman, 2009 for a brief review). In the eloquent words of Roger Brown (1958), words serve as invitations to form categories. Recent work reveals that even before they begin to produce any words on their own, naming facilitates the formation of object categories and supports the use of these categories in reasoning about objects. For example, Waxman and Markow (1995) presented infants with several distinctly diff erent toy objects (e.g., a dog, a duck, a bird), all members of the same object category (e.g., animal). Infants’ ability to detect the category-based commonality among these individuals was infl uenced powerfully by naming. All infants saw the very same sets of objects; for all infants, an experimenter called attention to each object as she off ered it to the infant. For infants in the No Word control condition, she said, “See what I have?” But for infants in the Word condition, she introduced each object in conjunction with the same novel word (e.g., “See the fauna ?”). Infants in the Word condition detected the commonality among the distinct individuals; those in the No Word condition did not. Th is facilitative eff ect of words has now been documented in infants as young as 3 and 6 months of age. Moreover, this “invitation” has considerable conceptual force, directing infants’ subsequent attention to new objects, even if they have yet to be named. In addition, providing a category name promotes infants’ and young children’s use of that category as an inductive base. For example, if they discover a new property of one individual (e.g., it makes a particular noise when it is shaken), they are more likely to expect that this property will also be true of another member of the category, OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRSTPROOFS, Wed Dec 26 2012, NEWGEN