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In Experiment 1, 24-month-old toddlers were taught a new word (whisk) through the labeling of a picture of a whisk. After repeated pairings of the word and picture, participants were shown the picture and a real whisk and asked to indicate the whisk. They took the word to refer to the real object rather than to the picture. Experiment 2 established that children were not biased to select any novel real object in the test trial. Rather, the results from Experiment 1 reflected the child’s interpretation of the word as referring to the pictured kind. A third study confirmed that a novelty preference within a perceptually specified category could not account for the results of Experiment 1. A final study (Experiment 4) examined whether 18-month-old infants also understand pictures and words as symbols, and results were comparable to those of Experiments 1 and 2. Taken together, these results confirm that the mapping between words and objects for 18- and 24-month-olds is a referential relation, as opposed to an associative one. Furthermore, these results showthat children as young as 18 months begin to understand the symbolic nature of pictures.
Preissler et al. (Sat,) studied this question.