ABSTRACT
Words seem to have a special status among perceptual signals. The developmental evidence, however, suggests that words become special. Woodward and Hoyne (1999) showed that 13-month-olds readily associate both words coming from the experimenter’s mouth and non-linguistic sounds coming from a hand-held noisemaker, with object categories. In contrast, 20-month-olds associate words but not non-linguistic sounds with object categories. Woodward and Hoyne suggest that words become privileged as possible names; that the forms a name can take are open at the beginning and become more restricted with development. Are children learning what forms count as words? If so, just what defining features are they learning? This paper presents an associationist account of this developmental trend and tests this explanation in two experiments with 20–26-month-old children.
