Learning from picture books: The effect of naming on infants’ transfer of nonobvious properties

Date
2012-10-01
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Abstract
The present study investigated whether naming would facilitate infants’ transfer of information from picture books to the real world. Independent groups of 18- and 21-month-olds were shown a picture book that taught them a novel label for a novel object. Infants then saw a second picture book in which an adult demonstrated how to elicit the object’s nonobvious property. Accompanying narration described the pictures using the object’s newly learned label. Infants were subsequently tested with the real-world object depicted in the book and a different-colour exemplar. Infants’ performance on the test trials was compared with that of infants in a no label condition. The odds of attempting to elicit the object’s nonobvious property with the exact object depicted in the book were almost 2.5 times greater for infants who heard the label compared to infants who did not. Naming did not predict test performance for the different-colour exemplar.
Description
Keywords
Psychology--Developmental
Citation
Khu, M. (2012). Learning from picture books: The effect of naming on infants’ transfer of nonobvious properties (Master's thesis, University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada). Retrieved from https://prism.ucalgary.ca. doi:10.11575/PRISM/26741