Learning words from pictures: 15- and 17-month-old infants appreciate the referential and symbolic links among words, pictures, and objects

This experiment was designed to clarify the referential status of infants’ newly learned words. We introduced 15- and 17-month-olds to a novel noun, presented in conjunction with pictures of two whisks that differed in color (one purple, one orange). We asked whether infants would extend this newly learned noun to other members of the same kind (other whisks), one differing only in color (a picture of a silver whisk) and another differing in...