Language shapes object categorization in infants. This starts as a general enhanced attentional effect of language, which narrows to a specific link between labels and categories by twelve months. The current experiments examined this narrowing effect by investigating when infants track a consistent label across varied input. Six-month-old infants (N = 48) were familiarized to category exemplars, each presented with the exact same labeling phrase or the same label in different phrases. Evidence of object categorization at test was only found with the same phrase, suggesting that infants were not tracking the label’s consistency, but rather that of the entire input. Nine-month-olds (N = 24) did show evidence of categorization across the varied phrases, suggesting that they were tracking the consistent label across the varied input.

语言塑造婴儿的对象分类。这开始于语言的普遍增强的注意力效应，在十二个月内缩小到标签和类别之间的特定联系。当前的实验通过调查婴儿何时在不同的输入中跟踪一致的标签来检验这种缩小效应。六个月大的婴儿 (N = 48) 熟悉类别示例，每个示例都具有完全相同的标签短语或不同短语中的相同标签。测试时对象分类的证据仅在相同的短语中发现，这表明婴儿没有跟踪标签的一致性，而是跟踪整个输入的一致性。九个月大的孩子 (N = 24) 确实显示了对不同短语进行分类的证据，这表明他们正在跟踪不同输入中的一致标签。