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# Naming influences 9-month-olds’ identification of discrete categories along a perceptual continuum

## Details

**Authors** Havy and Waxman

**Year** 2016

**Publisher** Cognition

**Discipline** Human Development

[Read it at the publisher](https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2016.07.011) 
10.1016/j.cognition.2016.07.011

## In authors' words

### What they set out to do (purpose)

Exploring the impact of naming on infant categorization.

### What they found (results)

This resulted in the two-name-group sorting the objects based on which end of the spectrum they resembled most, while the one-name-group did not sort. The researchers found that, “even when presented with a unimodal distribution, infants listening to two distinct names for exemplars at each end of the continuum formed two distinct categories.” Overall, they determined that “even before infants begin to produce words on their own, naming serves as a strong supervisory signal for category learning, supporting infants as they impose boundaries along a continuum and highlighting the categories joints.”

## Commentary

### In short

This implies that the addition of Distinctions i.e., naming) to the Systems (i.e., categories) the infants are trying to make aids in their forming part-whole systems and even can begin their comprehension of Relationships.

### In more detail

Havy and Waxman, 2016, did two experiments with 32 and 16 healthy nine month old infants. The general idea was that, “if infants formed two distinct categories during the learning phase, each linked to one (or the other) pole of the underlying distribution, then infants would detect that members of one category move to the right doors and members of the other category to the left.” In the first experiment, 32 healthy 9 month old infants were randomly assigned to either the one-name or two-name groups. The stimuli were a spectrum of colorful creature-esque objects going from one creature to the other. One group was shown the objects, and a nonsense name was spoken (the one-name-group), while the other group was shown the objects and the two objects on the ends of the spectrum were each given a different nonsense name (the two-name-group). This resulted in the two-name-group sorting the objects based on which end of the spectrum they resembled most, while the one-name-group did not sort. In the second experiment, 16 healthy, 9-month-old infants were given similar stimuli (with the distribution tighter around the poles) and performed the same procedure as the first experiment. The researchers found that, “even when presented with a unimodal distribution, infants listening to two distinct names for exemplars at each end of the continuum formed two distinct categories.” Overall, they determined that “even before infants begin to produce words on their own, naming serves as a strong supervisory signal for category learning, supporting infants as they impose boundaries along a continuum and highlighting the categories joints.” This implies that the addition of Distinctions i.e., naming) to the Systems (i.e., categories) the infants are trying to make aids in their forming part-whole systems and even can begin their comprehension of Relationships.

**Patterns it shows** D, S, R, P

**How to cite this** Havy and Waxman (2016). Naming influences 9-month-olds’ identification of discrete categories along a perceptual continuum. Cognition.