Vales, C. & Smith, L.
Indiana University, Bloomington IN, USA
Young children encounter objects, and learn to visually recognize everyday object categories, while also learning the names of things. Learning names for objects might over time change what visual information is accrued, and thus what children pay attention to when recognizing objects. To test this hypothesis, two- to three-year-old children were cued with either the category-level name of an object or the picture of an object, and asked to find that object in clutter. To measure what aspects of the objects children attended to, we used two types of stimuli: One that encourages attention to the object configuration (relevant features in their spatially correct locations) and another that encourages attention to individual features (relevant features scrambled). Children were more likely to attend to the individual features when cued with visual information, but more likely to attend to the object configuration when cued with linguistic information. Moreover, the child's vocabulary knowledge interacted with these patterns, further supporting the hypothesis that language changes visual object recognition. Taken together, these results suggest a role for language in changing object processing in young children, and that learning names for objects might over time change what visual properties of objects children attend to.