The acquisition of abstract words by young infants.
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 articleSubject
AdultAging
Eye Movements
Female
Fixation, Ocular
Humans
Infant
Language Development
Male
Mother-Child Relations
Mothers
Photic Stimulation
Vocabulary
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https://hdl.handle.net/10161/12631Published Version (Please cite this version)
10.1016/j.cognition.2013.02.011Publication 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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Show full item recordScholars@Duke
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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