The Nature of Early Word Comprehension: Symbols or Associations?

The current study investigated comprehension of object labels in young children. Eightand 14-month olds were presented with pairs of pictures (e.g., dog and ball) to establish infants’ initial looking preferences and then children heard a linguistic label (e.g., dog). Only 14-month-olds reliably increased looking to the referents after hearing the labels relative to their initial preference, which suggests that 14-month-olds were familiar with the word-object relations used in the current task. When the referent was paired with the source of the auditory information (e.g., dog paired with a person) and children heard a label (e.g., dog), 8-month-olds increased looking to the person relative to their initial preference and 14-month-olds’ comprehension of the word-object relations dropped to chance. These findings are consistent with the notion that children’s early word comprehension is associative in nature and questions whether young children understand the symbolic