Mechanisms Underlying the Effects of Labels on Cognitive Development

It has been argued that labels play a special role in cognitive development: hearing the same label associated with different entities facilitates categorization by directing infants’ attention to commonalities. The current study assessed 8-month-olds’ attention to commonalities and processing of visual input more generally when visual stimuli were presented without auditory input (baseline), as well as when paired with the same label, the same nonlinguistic sound, and pre-familiarized sound. Labels did affect infants’ looking differently than unfamiliar nonlinguistic sounds, however, these effects stemmed from sounds overshadowing (or attenuating processing of) visual input more than labels. Furthermore, when children were pre-familiarized to the nonlinguistic sounds prior to the experiment proper, effects of sounds and labels on processing visual input did not differ. Taken together, these findings suggest that labels may affect cognitive development differently than other types of stimuli because they represent a familiar class of stimuli.