The shape bias is affected by differing similarity among objects
Section snippets
Participants
Thirty-nine undergraduates (14 female) participated, recruited from a university psychology department undergraduate participant pool. English was their first and dominant language. Ten additional adults served as participants for the similarity ratings. They included graduate students and research assistants who had no detailed knowledge of the purpose of their ratings.
Materials
The stimuli consisted of five ‘quartets’ of novel objects (see Fig. 1). Each quartet included one target object, made from
Experiment 2
In Experiment 1 we manipulated color-matching and overall-matching test objects in low-similarity and high-similarity conditions while keeping the target and the exact-shape match the same. In Experiment 2, we tested 24-month olds, using different stimuli in high- and low-similarity sets to minimize memory load. Moreover, we used the Intermodal Preferential Looking Paradigm (IPL) to reduce task demands. An advantage of the IPL paradigm is that the language abilities of children can be tested at
General discussion
In Experiment 1, we investigated whether adults preferred shape similarity vs. overall similarity in a novel-name extension task; we found that adults were more directed to shape with low-similarity items than with high-similarity items, regardless of the presence of a novel name. In Experiment 2, we examined the same phenomenon, this time with 2-year olds. Like adults, the children showed a stronger shape bias with low-similarity than high-similarity items; however, for the children this
Acknowledgements
We thank the National Institutes of Health (National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders, NIHDCD, R01 DC07428) and the National Alliance for Autism Research for supporting this research. We are extremely grateful to all the parents and children for their cheerful participation. Thanks are also due to the numerous undergraduate students for their help in data collection and coding.
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