Words and Shape Similarity Guide 13-month-olds' Inferences about Nonobvious Object Properties

We examined the influence of shape similarity and object labels on 13-month-old infants' inductive inferences. In two experiments, infants were presented with novel target objects with or without a nonobvious property, followed by test objects that varied in shape similarity to the target. When objects were not labeled, infants generalized the nonobvious property to test objects that were highly similar in shape (Expt. 1). When objects were labeled with novel nouns, infants generalized the nonobvious property to both high shape similarity and low shape similarity test objects (Expt. 2). These findings indicate that infants as young as 13 months of age expect those objects which share the same shape or the same label to possess the same nonobvious property.