Abstract

Object individuation provides a test case for the claim that infants already have a prelinguistic language-of-thought (LOT). By 12 months, infants represent several sortal-kinds: Object, agent, animate, and perhaps artifact. Infants have also encountered many words for object kinds, animals, people, and artifacts, therefore it remains a viable hypothesis that language learning may play a causal role in the acquisition of sortal-kinds, contra Quilty-Dunn et al.