Is a Picture Worth a Thousand Words? Preference for Auditory Modality in Young Children

• Published in: Child development Vol. 74; no. 3; pp. 822 - 833
• Main Authors: Sloutsky, Vladimir M., Napolitano, Amanda C.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Boston, USA and Oxford, UK Blackwell Publishing Inc 01.05.2003; Blackwell Publishers; Blackwell; Blackwell Publishing Ltd
• Subjects: Acoustic data; Adult; Age Factors; Age groups; Auditory information; Auditory Perception; Auditory Stimulation; Auditory Stimuli; Biological and medical sciences; Calibration; Child; Child Development; Child, Preschool; Children; Classification; Cognitive development; Cognitive Processes; Comparative Analysis; Concept Formation; Developmental psychology; Empirical Articles; Experimentation; Experiments; Family studies; Female; Fundamental and applied biological sciences. Psychology; Geometric shapes; Humans; Infants; Labeling (of Objects); Labelling; Language; Language Processing; Lexical functioning; Linguistics; Male; Perceptual Development; Preference Patterns; Preschool Children; Psychology. Psychoanalysis. Psychiatry; Psychology. Psychophysiology; Teenagers; Visual Perception; Visual Stimulation; Visual Stimuli; Human; Preschool age; Hearing; Language; Preference; Vision; Stimulus modality; Perception; Cognition; Cognitive development; Experimental study; Child
• ISSN: 0009-3920; 1467-8624
• DOI: 10.1111/1467-8624.00570

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.