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Is a Picture Worth a Thousand Words? Preference for Auditory Modality in Young Children
Author(s) -
Sloutsky Vladimir M.,
Napolitano Amanda C.
Publication year - 2003
Publication title -
child development
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 3.103
H-Index - 257
eISSN - 1467-8624
pISSN - 0009-3920
DOI - 10.1111/1467-8624.00570
Subject(s) - psychology , preference , cognitive psychology , auditory stimuli , auditory perception , modality (human–computer interaction) , visual perception , perception , developmental psychology , neuroscience , human–computer interaction , computer science , economics , microeconomics
Linguistic labels play an important role in young children's conceptual organization: When 2 entities share a label, people expect these entities to share many other properties. Two classes of explanations of the importance of labels seem plausible: a language‐specific and a general auditory explanation. The general auditory explanation argues that the importance of labels stems from a privileged processing status of auditory input (as compared with visual input) for young children. This hypothesis was tested and supported in 4 experiments. When auditory and visual stimuli were presented separately, 4‐year‐olds were likely to process both kinds of stimuli, whereas when auditory and visual stimuli were presented simultaneously, 4‐year‐olds were more likely to process auditory stimuli than visual stimuli.