"Our findings offer one piece of the very large puzzle that is vocabulary development," said Brock Ferguson, lead author of the study and a doctoral candidate in cognitive psychology at Northwestern University in US.
"This is a big first step towards using these cognitive tasks to identify infants at risk for language delays," Ferguson said.
Ferguson offers a real-world analogy to the situation researchers create in the lab to measure infants' use of names as a guide to object categorisation.
"Imagine you are taking your baby for a visit to the primate house at the zoo," he said.
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"There are gorillas, chimpanzees and monkeys in the primate house. Although all the primates look fairly similar, but we know them to be different because we refer to them by different names," said Ferguson.
"In our study, babies who went ahead and grouped objects together even though the researchers had labelled them with distinct names were later found to know fewer words," he said.
Cognitive development is broadly defined as the process by which babies and young children learn about the world around them, and includes the acquisition of problem solving, memory, perception and language.
"This new finding is the first to link infants' performance on our cognitive task to their progress in learning new words," said Waxman, a professor of cognitive psychology and a faculty fellow in the university's Institute for Policy Research.
The research appears in the journal Frontiers in Psychology.