Is a picture worth a thousand words? Preference for auditory modality in young children.

Full Abstract

Linguistic labels play an important role in young children's conceptual organization:
When 2 entities share a label, people expect these entities to share many other properties. Two classes of explanations of the importance of labels seem plausible:
a language-specific and a general auditory explanation. The general auditory explanation argues that the importance of labels stems from a privileged processing status of auditory input (as compared with visual input) for young children. This hypothesis was tested and supported in 4 experiments. When auditory and visual stimuli were presented separately, 4-year-olds were likely to process both kinds of stimuli, whereas when auditory and visual stimuli were presented simultaneously, 4-year-olds were more likely to process auditory stimuli than visual stimuli.

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Author information

Author/s: Sloutsky, Vladimir M (VM); Napolitano, Amanda C (AC);

Affiliation: Center for Cognitive Science, The Ohio State University, Columbus 43210, USA. Sloutsky.1(-atsign-)osu.edu

Journal and publication information

Publication Type: Comparative Study; Journal Article; Research Support, U.S. Gov't, Non-P.H.S.

Journal: Child development (Child Dev), published in United States. (Language: eng)

Reference: -2003 May-Jun; vol 74 (issue 3) : pp 822-33

Dates: Created 2003/06/10; Completed 2003/10/10; Revised 2006/11/15;

PMID: 12795392, status: MEDLINE (last retrieval date: 12/26/2008)

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