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The acquisition of abstract words by young infants.

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Date
2013-06
Authors
Bergelson, Elika
Swingley, Daniel
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Abstract
Young infants' learning of words for abstract concepts like 'all gone' and 'eat,' in contrast to their learning of more concrete words like 'apple' and 'shoe,' may follow a relatively protracted developmental course. We examined whether infants know such abstract words. Parents named one of two events shown in side-by-side videos while their 6-16-month-old infants (n=98) watched. On average, infants successfully looked at the named video by 10 months, but not earlier, and infants' looking at the named referent increased robustly at around 14 months. Six-month-olds already understand concrete words in this task (Bergelson & Swingley, 2012). A video-corpus analysis of unscripted mother-infant interaction showed that mothers used the tested abstract words less often in the presence of their referent events than they used concrete words in the presence of their referent objects. We suggest that referential uncertainty in abstract words' teaching conditions may explain the later acquisition of abstract than concrete words, and we discuss the possible role of changes in social-cognitive abilities over the 6-14 month period.
Type
Journal article
Subject
Adult
Aging
Eye Movements
Female
Fixation, Ocular
Humans
Infant
Language Development
Male
Mother-Child Relations
Mothers
Photic Stimulation
Vocabulary
Permalink
https://hdl.handle.net/10161/12631
Published Version (Please cite this version)
10.1016/j.cognition.2013.02.011
Publication Info
Bergelson, Elika; & Swingley, Daniel (2013). The acquisition of abstract words by young infants. Cognition, 127(3). pp. 391-397. 10.1016/j.cognition.2013.02.011. Retrieved from https://hdl.handle.net/10161/12631.
This is constructed from limited available data and may be imprecise. To cite this article, please review & use the official citation provided by the journal.
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Scholars@Duke

Bergelson

Elika Bergelson

Crandall Family Assistant Professor
Dr. Bergelson accepts PhD applicants through the Developmental and Cog/CogNeuro areas of P&N and the CNAP program.In my research, I try to understand the interplay of processes during language acquisition. In particular, I am interested in how word learning relates to other aspects of learning language (e.g. speech sound acquisition, grammar/morphology learning), and social/cognitive development more broadly (e.g. joint attention processes) in the first few
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