O mapa antes da estrada: um estudo psicolinguístico de como o bebê categoriza os conteúdos do mundo

Abstract

This work investigates infant cognition with a focus on object categorization and the relationships between language, animacy, and communication in the early stages of human development. Anchored in the Nature x Nurture debate, the thesis examines whether the formation of conceptual categories in infants depends on communicative and linguistic stimuli or whether it constitutes an endogenous cognitive competence, inherent to the architecture of the human mind. In this context, the Dendrophilia Hypothesis is proposed, according to which categorization corresponds to a structural tendency of the cognitive system to organize the world, prior to language and not dependent on the communicative context. To test this hypothesis, a behavioral experiment inspired by the protocols of Ferguson and Waxman (2017) was conducted with six-month-old infants, following a 2×2 factorial design that crossed the variables communicative context (presence vs. absence of interaction) and animacy (geometric figures with vs. without eyes), resulting in four experimental conditions. Participants were exposed to visual (dinosaurs or fish) and auditory (non-linguistic tone sequences) stimuli, and measures of preferential gaze and fixation time were analyzed as indicators of category formation. The results indicate that infants were able to categorize objects consistently even in the absence of communicative and linguistic stimuli, suggesting that such elements are not necessary conditions for the emergence of categorization. The presence of animacy traits and communicative context acted as a modulating factor in the categorical process, influencing attentional allocation and stimulus processing time. In particular, contexts enriched by social or anthropomorphic cues tended to prolong the analysis time, without, however, compromising or determining category formation.