ABSTRACT
Researchers have traditionally investigated children's first words to understand the nature of early cognitive development, but the relation between first words and early concepts turns out not as straightforward as hoped. Over the past 15 years, Jean Mandler and I have examined concept development using various nonverbal measures. We knew that at some point we would have to address the topic of language acquisition because our findings contrasted sharply with the assumption that basic level concepts provide the foundation on which basic level nouns are first understood. However, our time was consumed with research designed to untangle the perceptual and conceptual aspects of early categorization abilities in infants and young children. I fondly regard these experiments as works in progress. More recently, I began to focus on how language and early concepts embellish each other. Armed with the implications of my research with Jean Mandler, I set out to uncover what young children understand about the meanings of the early words they learn. As will be discussed, many researchers have made assumptions about early language use that have not been formally tested, many have designed experiments that confound the bases children use for learning the meanings of their first words, and others have used clever but impractical stimuli to tout the role of similarity in children's generalizations of basic level terms. But first, a brief overview of our research on preverbal concepts is in order. If I wanted to test the meanings young children entertain when using their first words, I needed to consider what they understand in the first place.
