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Is core knowledge in the format of LOT?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 September 2023

Fei Xu*
Affiliation:
Department of Psychology, University of California, Berkeley, CA, USA fei_xu@berkeley.edu https://www.babylab.berkeley.edu/feixu

Abstract

Object individuation provides a test case for the claim that infants already have a prelinguistic language-of-thought (LOT). By 12 months, infants represent several sortal-kinds: Object, agent, animate, and perhaps artifact. Infants have also encountered many words for object kinds, animals, people, and artifacts, therefore it remains a viable hypothesis that language learning may play a causal role in the acquisition of sortal-kinds, contra Quilty-Dunn et al.

Type
Open Peer Commentary
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2023. Published by Cambridge University Press

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