Journal of Cognition and Development For Peer Review Only

Two important and related developments in children between 18 and 24 months of age are the rapid expansion of object name vocabularies and the emergence of an ability to recognize objects from sparse representations of their geometric shapes. In the same period, children also begin to show a preference for planar views (i.e., views of objects held perpendicular to the line of sight) of objects they manually explore. Are children’s emerging view preferences somehow related to contemporary changes in object name vocabulary and object perception? Children aged 18 to 24 months explored richly detailed toy objects while wearing a head-camera that recorded their object views. Both children’s vocabulary size and their success in recognizing sparse 3-D representations of the geometric shapes of objects were significantly related to their spontaneous choice of planar views of those objects during exploration. The results suggest important interdependencies among developmental changes in perception, action, word learning and categorization in very young children. Children routinely investigate objects in their environment through manual exploration. This exploration may be a crucial step in the construction of stored object representations at a very early age, as manual exploration allows children to encode multiple views of objects that may not be acquired through observation alone (Pereira