Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

Partitioning the world into meaningful categories is a challenging task, especially considering the vast amount of information that could be recruited in the process (Cohen do infants successfully organize the world into meaningful categories? In recent years, tremendous strides have been made toward investigating the conditions under which infants form categories, as well as the types of information that they consider in doing so (see Pauen, Birgit, Hoehl, ng category discrimination at a preverbal age, thereby focusing on whether infants develop knowledge-based representations for categories before language comes into play (Poulin-Dubois such as the basic level? Regarding the last issue, labels are considered to boost object categorization by allowing infants to focus on commonalities (Ferguson Lupyan, Rakison Waxman 2003). However, the exact function of labelling is unclear as well as whether bilingual children benefit as much from language when forming categories given their strategy to map more than one word to an object. The series of studies to be conducted in the context of the current research program attempts to fill these gaps.**