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The Development of Color Representations from Infancy to Early Childhood /

Abstract

This dissertation investigates color representations during early development. It provides new insight into the infant's perceptual experience as well as the process by which children map color words to color percepts. Chapter 1 provides the first experimental evidence for the long- standing theory that a developmental period of exuberant neural connectivity followed by a retraction and reweighting of connections causes infants to experience increased synesthetic intermingling of their sensations that typical adults do not experience. We show that the presence of particular shapes influences color preferences in typical two- and three-month olds, but not in eight- month olds or adults. These data suggest that infants may experience a sensory phenomenon unlike anything experienced by typical adults but similar to the sensory experiences of adults with synesthesia, a rare sensory phenomenon that has been associated with exuberant neural connectivity and is characterized by strong arbitrary associations between different sensations. Chapter 2 examines children's ability to abstract color and assign labels to specific color categories. Children use color words incorrectly for many months before they converge on correct adult definitions. Most current accounts propose that the delay between children's first production of color words and adult-like understanding is due to problems abstracting color as a domain of meaning. Chapter 2 challenges this account with analyses of color word errors in two- to four-year-olds' speech and comprehension. We find that children's errors are systematic and best characterized as overextensions of adult meanings - a finding inconsistent with the notion that these children have not yet abstracted color as a domain of meaning. Chapter 3 examines color word comprehension in younger children between 18- and 33- months and finds that on average, children construct preliminary meanings for some color words prior to producing any color words. In other words, color words are not an exception to the typical pattern of language comprehension before production. These results also imply that color word errors cannot be due to a failure to abstract color as a domain of linguistic meaning. Rather, the errors likely result from a process through which children gradually converge on correct language specific color word boundaries

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