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Luchkina E, Waxman S. Semantic priming supports infants' ability to learn names of unseen objects. PLoS One 2025; 20:e0321775. [PMID: 40267063 PMCID: PMC12017536 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0321775] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [MESH Headings] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 05/16/2024] [Accepted: 03/10/2025] [Indexed: 04/25/2025] Open
Abstract
Human language permits us to call to mind representations of objects, events, and ideas that we cannot witness directly, enabling us to learn about the world far beyond our immediate surroundings. When and how does this capacity emerge? To address this question, we evaluated infants at 12 and 15 months, asking whether they establish a representation of a novel noun's meaning in the absence of any visible referents, and use this representation to identify a candidate referent when it later becomes available. During training, infants (67 12-month-olds; 67 15-month-olds) were primed with words and images of objects from a particular semantic neighborhood (e.g., fruits) and were also introduced to a novel noun (e.g., "a modi"), used to name a hidden object. During test, infants heard that noun again, this time with two unfamiliar objects present-one from the primed neighborhood (e.g., a dragon fruit) and the other from an unrelated semantic neighborhood (e.g., an ottoman). If infants can represent something about the meaning of the novel noun in the absence of a visible referent and then use such a representation when a candidate referent appears, then at test, they should prefer the object from the primed semantic neighborhood. At 15 months, infants succeeded. In contrast, 12-month-olds did not succeed on this task even after a full week of vocabulary training designed to boost the effect of priming. It is possible then that 12-month-olds' representations of novel nouns' meaning are not yet sufficiently rich (if any at all) to guide their choice of referent when one does appear. Together, these findings suggest that the capacity to establish a representation of a novel noun's meaning in the absence of any visible referent and use this representation later to identify a candidate referent object emerges between 12 and 15 months.
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Affiliation(s)
- Elena Luchkina
- Department of Psychology, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States Of America
| | - Sandra Waxman
- Institute of Policy Research, Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois, United States Of America
- Department of Psychology, Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois, United States Of America
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2
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Luchkina E, Waxman S. Talking About the Absent and the Abstract: Referential Communication in Language and Gesture. PERSPECTIVES ON PSYCHOLOGICAL SCIENCE 2024; 19:978-992. [PMID: 37603076 PMCID: PMC10879458 DOI: 10.1177/17456916231180589] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 08/22/2023]
Abstract
Human language permits us to call to mind objects, events, and ideas that we cannot witness directly, either because they are absent or because they have no physical form (e.g., people we have not met, concepts like justice). What enables language to transmit such knowledge? We propose that a referential link between words, referents, and mental representations of those referents is key. This link enables us to form, access, and modify mental representations even when the referents themselves are absent ("absent reference"). In this review we consider the developmental and evolutionary origins of absent reference, integrating previously disparate literatures on absent reference in language and gesture in very young humans and gesture in nonhuman primates. We first evaluate when and how infants acquire absent reference during the process of language acquisition. With this as a foundation, we consider the evidence for absent reference in gesture in infants and in nonhuman primates. Finally, having woven these literatures together, we highlight new lines of research that promise to sharpen our understanding of the development of reference and its role in learning about the absent and the abstract.
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Affiliation(s)
- Elena Luchkina
- Department of Psychology, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, United States of America
- Institute of Policy Research, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, United States of America
| | - Sandra Waxman
- Department of Psychology, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, United States of America
- Institute of Policy Research, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, United States of America
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3
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Luchkina E, Xu F. How does social contingency facilitate vocabulary development? Dev Sci 2024; 27:e13525. [PMID: 38712761 DOI: 10.1111/desc.13525] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 07/21/2023] [Revised: 04/11/2024] [Accepted: 04/24/2024] [Indexed: 05/08/2024]
Abstract
Previous research shows that infants of parents who are more likely to engage in socially contingent interactions with them tend to have larger vocabularies. An open question is how social contingency facilitates vocabulary growth. One possibility is that parents who speak in response to their infants more often produce larger amount of language input, which accelerates vocabulary growth. Another possibility is that the simplicity of contingent language input is especially suitable to support early word learning. A third possibility is that more evidence of the communicative nature of language, achieved through frequent contingent responses, helps infants build a link between their own words or vocalizations and others' behaviors. This link may lead to a better understanding of the communicative nature of language and further language advances, including vocabulary growth. To distinguish between these hypotheses, we analyzed the relations between parent-infant interactions when infants were 9 months and their vocabulary size at 12 months, using a naturalistic corpus. Our findings show that the frequency of parents' verbal contingent responses predicts receptive vocabulary size at 12 months and this predictive relation is unlikely to be due to the amount of language input or the simplicity of language within socially contingent interactions. RESEARCH HIGHLIGHTS: Infants of parents who respond to their vocalizations more often during the first year of life tend to have larger vocabularies in the second year. It is an open question what drives the predictive relation between parents' responsiveness and infants' vocabulary; we tested three hypotheses that offer competing explanations. More responsive parents might provide (1) more language input, (2) simpler language input, (3) more evidence of the communicative nature of language (via frequent responses). We find support for the third hypothesis; the frequency of parents' responses predicts infants' vocabularies above and beyond the amount and simplicity of language input.
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Affiliation(s)
- Elena Luchkina
- Department of Psychology, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA
- Department of Psychology, University of California Berkeley, Berkeley, California, USA
| | - Fei Xu
- Department of Psychology, University of California Berkeley, Berkeley, California, USA
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4
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Forgács B. Meaning as mentalization. Front Hum Neurosci 2024; 18:1384116. [PMID: 38855407 PMCID: PMC11158629 DOI: 10.3389/fnhum.2024.1384116] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 02/08/2024] [Accepted: 05/02/2024] [Indexed: 06/11/2024] Open
Abstract
The way we establish meaning has been a profound question not only in language research but in developmental science as well. The relation between linguistic form and content has been loosened up in recent pragmatic approaches to communication, showing that code-based models of language comprehension must be augmented by context-sensitive, pragmatic-inferential mechanisms to recover the speaker's intended meaning. Language acquisition has traditionally been thought to involve building a mental lexicon and extracting syntactic rules from noisy linguistic input, while communicative-pragmatic inferences have also been argued to be indispensable. Recent research findings exploring the electrophysiological indicator of semantic processing, the N400, have raised serious questions about the traditional separation between semantic decoding and pragmatic inferential processes. The N400 appears to be sensitive to mentalization-the ability to attribute beliefs to social partners-already from its developmental onset. This finding raises the possibility that mentalization may not simply contribute to pragmatic inferences that enrich linguistic decoding processes but that the semantic system may be functioning in a fundamentally mentalistic manner. The present review first summarizes the key contributions of pragmatic models of communication to language comprehension. Then, it provides an overview of how communicative intentions are interpreted in developmental theories of communication, with a special emphasis on mentalization. Next, it discusses the sensitivity of infants to the information-transmitting potential of language, their ability to pick up its code-like features, and their capacity to track language comprehension of social partners using mentalization. In conclusion, I argue that the recovery of meaning during linguistic communication is not adequately modeled as a process of code-based semantic retrieval complemented by pragmatic inferences. Instead, the semantic system may establish meaning, as intended, during language comprehension and acquisition through mentalistic attribution of content to communicative partners.
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Affiliation(s)
- Bálint Forgács
- Department of Experimental and Neurocognitive Psychology, Freie Universität Berlin, Berlin, Germany
- Department of Cognitive Psychology, ELTE Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, Hungary
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5
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Schulze C, Buttelmann D. Infants differentiate between successful and failed communication in a false-belief context. Infant Behav Dev 2022; 69:101770. [PMID: 36113367 DOI: 10.1016/j.infbeh.2022.101770] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 03/14/2022] [Revised: 06/28/2022] [Accepted: 09/08/2022] [Indexed: 11/30/2022]
Abstract
Communication is based on social interaction, that is, interlocutors sharing attention to the intentions that they communicate about. In this study, we asked whether infants are aware of the fact that for information to be transferred, both interlocutors need to be present and share attention. Using a violation-of-expectation paradigm created to test infants' understanding of others' false beliefs, we asked whether 18-month-olds (n = 84) understood that correcting an agent's false belief via communication requires that the agent discerns the verbal statement. Participants saw how an agent put a toy into a box and left. An assistant then moved the toy into a cup. The intervention phase varied between three conditions: The agent and the assistant communicated about the actual location of the toy (full-communication), the agent was absent during the assistant's statement (incomplete-communication) or no communication took place (no-communication). At test, the agent reached into either the box or the cup. When no communication took place, infants expected the agent to search the toy at the original location. Full communication resulted in infants' expectations that the recipient's actions were altered, that is, the infants expected her to search the toy at the actual location. In contrast, incomplete communication did not yield clear expectations. Eighteen-month-olds thus seem to understand that for information to be transferred, it is a precondition that the recipient of the communicative act must be present and share attention during the communicator's statement. Only then communication can change a recipient's mental state.
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Affiliation(s)
- Cornelia Schulze
- Department of Educational Psychology, Faculty of Education, University of Leipzig, Germany; Leipzig Research Center for Early Child Development, Leipzig, Germany; University of Erfurt, Germany.
| | - David Buttelmann
- University of Erfurt, Germany; Department of Developmental Psychology, Institute of Psychology, University of Bern, Switzerland
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6
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Abstract
In the first year of life, infants' word learning is slow, laborious, and requires repeated exposure to word-referent co-occurrences. In contrast, by 14-18 months, infants learn words from just a few labeling events, use joint attention and eye gaze to decipher word meaning, and begin to use speech to communicate about absent things. We propose that this remarkable advancement in word learning results from attaining a referential understanding of words-that words are linked to mental representations and used intentionally to communicate about real-world entities. We suggest that verbal reference is supported by codeveloping conceptual, social, representational, and statistical learning capacities. We also propose that infants' recognition of this tri-directional link between words, referents, and mental representations is enabled by their experience participating in and observing socially contingent interactions. Understanding verbal reference signals a qualitative shift in infants' word learning. This shift enables infants to bootstrap word meanings from syntax and semantics, learn novel words and facts from nonostensive communication, and make inferences about speakers' epistemic competence based on their language production. In this paper, we review empirical findings across multiple facets of infant cognition and propose a novel developmental theory of verbal reference. Finally, we suggest new directions of empirical research that may provide stronger and more direct evidence for our theory and contribute to our understanding of the development of verbal reference and language-mediated learning in infancy and beyond. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).
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Affiliation(s)
| | - Fei Xu
- Department of Psychology, University of California,
Berkeley
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7
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Ikeda A, Kanakogi Y, Hirai M. Visual perspective-taking ability in 7- and 12-month-old infants. PLoS One 2022; 17:e0263653. [PMID: 35171927 PMCID: PMC8849517 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0263653] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [MESH Headings] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Download PDF] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 04/02/2021] [Accepted: 01/24/2022] [Indexed: 11/19/2022] Open
Abstract
Understanding how we see the world is different from how other people see it is a crucial part of social cognition and is known as visual perspective-taking. Although previous studies have demonstrated that 14-month-old infants have the capacity to compute the visual perspectives of others, it remains unknown whether infants under 12 months also have this ability. In this study, we modified a conventional gaze-following experimental setting in which one toy was placed in front of a model and was hidden by a barrier (Blocked Line of Sight Condition), and another toy was placed without a barrier (Clear Line of Sight Condition). We examined the visual perspective-taking abilities of 48 infants aged 7 and 12 months by measuring the infants’ gaze shift towards the gaze-cued toy object with and without a barrier. The results demonstrated that 12-month-old infants could correctly follow a model’s gaze if the model’s line of sight was clear. In contrast, 7-month-old infants showed no evidence of such capacity. Our findings indicate that 12-month-old infants seem to have the capacity to compute the visual perspective of others.
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Affiliation(s)
- Ayaka Ikeda
- Center for Development of Advanced Medical Technology, Jichi Medical University, Tochigi, Japan
- Department of Psychology, Senshu University, Kanagawa, Japan
| | - Yasuhiro Kanakogi
- Department of Comparative and Developmental Psychology, Graduate School of Human Sciences, Osaka University, Osaka, Japan
| | - Masahiro Hirai
- Center for Development of Advanced Medical Technology, Jichi Medical University, Tochigi, Japan
- Department of Cognitive and Psychological Sciences, Graduate School of Informatics, Nagoya University, Nagoya, Japan
- Department of Pediatrics, Jichi Medical University, Tochigi, Japan
- * E-mail:
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8
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Ohmer X, Franke M, König P. Mutual Exclusivity in Pragmatic Agents. Cogn Sci 2022; 46:e13069. [PMID: 34973036 DOI: 10.1111/cogs.13069] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 10/08/2021] [Revised: 10/11/2021] [Accepted: 10/30/2021] [Indexed: 11/28/2022]
Abstract
One of the great challenges in word learning is that words are typically uttered in a context with many potential referents. Children's tendency to associate novel words with novel referents, which is taken to reflect a mutual exclusivity (ME) bias, forms a useful disambiguation mechanism. We study semantic learning in pragmatic agents-combining the Rational Speech Act model with gradient-based learning-and explore the conditions under which such agents show an ME bias. This approach provides a framework for investigating a pragmatic account of the ME bias in humans but also for building artificial agents that display an ME bias. A series of analyses demonstrates striking parallels between our model and human word learning regarding several aspects relevant to the ME bias phenomenon: online inference, long-term learning, and developmental effects. By testing different implementations, we find that two components, pragmatic online inference and incremental collection of evidence for one-to-one correspondences between words and referents, play an important role in modeling the developmental trajectory of the ME bias. Finally, we outline an extension of our model to a deep neural network architecture that can process more naturalistic visual and linguistic input. Until now, in contrast to children, deep neural networks have needed indirect access to (supposed to be novel) test inputs during training to display an ME bias. Our model is the first one to do so without using this manipulation.
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Affiliation(s)
- Xenia Ohmer
- Institute of Cognitive Science, University of Osnabrück
| | - Michael Franke
- Institute of Cognitive Science, University of Osnabrück.,Department of Linguistics, University of Tübingen
| | - Peter König
- Institute of Cognitive Science, University of Osnabrück.,Department of Neurophysiology and Pathophysiology, University Medical Center Hamburg- Eppendorf
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9
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Bergey C, Marshall Z, DeDeo S, Yurovsky D. Learning Communicative Acts in Children's Conversations: A Hidden Topic Markov Model Analysis of the CHILDES Corpora. Top Cogn Sci 2021; 14:388-399. [PMID: 34914179 DOI: 10.1111/tops.12591] [Citation(s) in RCA: 1] [Impact Index Per Article: 0.3] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 09/27/2021] [Revised: 11/02/2021] [Accepted: 11/02/2021] [Indexed: 10/19/2022]
Abstract
Over their first years of life, children learn not just the words of their native languages, but how to use them to communicate. Because manual annotation of communicative intent does not scale to large corpora, our understanding of communicative act development is limited to case studies of a few children at a few time points. We present an approach to automatic identification of communicative acts using a hidden topic Markov model, applying it to the conversations of English-learning children in the CHILDES database. We first describe qualitative changes in parent-child communication over development, and then use our method to demonstrate two large-scale features of communicative development: (a) children develop a parent-like repertoire of our model's communicative acts rapidly, their learning rate peaking around 14 months of age, and (b) this period of steep repertoire change coincides with the highest predictability between parents' acts and children's, suggesting that structured interactions play a role in learning to communicate.
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Affiliation(s)
| | - Zoe Marshall
- Department of Psychology, Carnegie Mellon University
| | - Simon DeDeo
- Santa Fe Institute.,Department of Social and Decision Sciences, Carnegie Mellon University
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10
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Luchkina E, Waxman S. Acquiring verbal reference: The interplay of cognitive, linguistic, and general learning capacities. Infant Behav Dev 2021; 65:101624. [PMID: 34388367 DOI: 10.1016/j.infbeh.2021.101624] [Citation(s) in RCA: 1] [Impact Index Per Article: 0.3] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 09/15/2020] [Revised: 07/16/2021] [Accepted: 07/29/2021] [Indexed: 11/19/2022]
Abstract
Verbal reference is the ability to use language to communicate about objects, events, or ideas, even if they are not witnessed directly, such as past events or faraway places. It rests on a three-way link between words, their referents, and mental representations of those referents. A foundational human capacity, verbal reference extends the communicative power of language beyond the here-and-now, enabling access to language-mediated learning and thus fueling cognitive development. In the current review, we consider how and when verbal reference develops. The existing literature suggests that verbal reference emerges around infants' first birthdays and becomes increasingly robust by their second. In discussing the powerful developmental advantages of acquiring verbal reference we propose that this achievement requires a dynamic interplay among infants' cognitive and language development, fueled by general learning capacities. We close by describing new research directions, aimed at advancing our understanding of how verbal reference emerges.
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Affiliation(s)
- Elena Luchkina
- Department of Psychology, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, United States; Institute of Policy Research, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, United States.
| | - Sandra Waxman
- Department of Psychology, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, United States; Institute of Policy Research, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, United States
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11
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Cho I, Lee Y, Song HJ. Six-month-olds' ability to use linguistic cues when interpreting others' pointing actions. Infant Behav Dev 2021; 64:101621. [PMID: 34371386 DOI: 10.1016/j.infbeh.2021.101621] [Citation(s) in RCA: 1] [Impact Index Per Article: 0.3] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 08/03/2020] [Revised: 07/15/2021] [Accepted: 07/27/2021] [Indexed: 11/24/2022]
Abstract
The present research investigated whether six-month-olds who rarely produce pointing actions can detect the object-directedness and communicative function of others' pointing actions when linguistic information is provided. In Experiment 1, infants were randomly assigned to either a novel-word or emotional-vocalization condition. They were first familiarized with an event in which an actor uttered either a novel label (novel-word condition) or exclamatory expression (emotional-vocalization condition) and then pointed to one of two objects. Next, the positions of the objects were switched. During test trials, each infant watched the new-referent event where the actor pointed to the object to which the actor had not pointed before or the old-referent event where the actor pointed to the old object in its new location. Infants in the novel-word condition looked reliably longer at the new-referent event than at the old-referent event, suggesting that they encoded the object-directedness of the actor's point. In contrast, infants in the emotional-vocalization condition showed roughly equal looking times to the two events. To further examine infants' understanding of the communicative aspect of an actor's point using a different communicative context, Experiment 2 used an identical procedure to the novel-word condition in Experiment 1, except there was only one object present during the familiarization trials. When the familiarization trials did not include a contrasting object, we found that the communicative intention of the actor's point could be ambiguous. The infants showed roughly equal looking times during the two test events. The current research suggests that six-month-olds understand the object-directedness and communicative intention of others' pointing when presented with a label, but not when presented with an emotional non-speech vocalization.
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Affiliation(s)
- Isu Cho
- Department of Psychology, Brandeis University, Waltham, Massachusetts, USA
| | - Yoonha Lee
- Department of Psychology, Yonsei University, Seoul, South Korea
| | - Hyun-Joo Song
- Department of Psychology, Yonsei University, Seoul, South Korea.
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12
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Small procedural differences matter: Conceptual and direct replication attempts of the communication-intervention effect on infants’ false-belief ascriptions. COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT 2021. [DOI: 10.1016/j.cogdev.2021.101054] [Citation(s) in RCA: 3] [Impact Index Per Article: 0.8] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 11/23/2022]
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13
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Vouloumanos A, Yamashiro A. Building a Communication System in Infancy. MINNESOTA SYMPOSIA ON CHILD PSYCHOLOGY 2021. [DOI: 10.1002/9781119684527.ch2] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 11/06/2022]
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14
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Luchkina E, Waxman SR. Semantic priming supports infants' ability to learn names of unseen objects. PLoS One 2021; 16:e0244968. [PMID: 33412565 PMCID: PMC7790528 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0244968] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [MESH Headings] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Download PDF] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 05/14/2020] [Accepted: 12/18/2020] [Indexed: 11/30/2022] Open
Abstract
Human language permits us to call to mind objects, events, and ideas that we cannot witness directly. This capacity rests upon abstract verbal reference: the appreciation that words are linked to mental representations that can be established, retrieved and modified, even when the entities to which a word refers is perceptually unavailable. Although establishing verbal reference is a pivotal achievement, questions concerning its developmental origins remain. To address this gap, we investigate infants' ability to establish a representation of an object, hidden from view, from language input alone. In two experiments, 15-month-olds (N = 72) and 12-month-olds (N = 72) watch as an actor names three familiar, visible objects; she then provides a novel name for a fourth, hidden fully from infants' view. In the Semantic Priming condition, the visible familiar objects all belong to the same semantic neighborhood (e.g., apple, banana, orange). In the No Priming condition, the objects are drawn from different semantic neighborhoods (e.g., apple, shoe, car). At test infants view two objects. If infants can use the naming information alone to identify the likely referent, then infants in the Semantic Priming, but not in the No Priming condition, will successfully infer the referent of the fourth (hidden) object. Brief summary of results here. Implications for the development of abstract verbal reference will be discussed.
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Affiliation(s)
- Elena Luchkina
- Department of Psychology, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, United States of America
- Institute of Policy Research, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, United States of America
| | - Sandra R. Waxman
- Department of Psychology, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, United States of America
- Institute of Policy Research, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, United States of America
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15
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Özdemir B, Ganea PA. Variability in toddlers’ ability to verbally update their mental representations of absent objects. J Exp Child Psychol 2020; 196:104843. [DOI: 10.1016/j.jecp.2020.104843] [Citation(s) in RCA: 3] [Impact Index Per Article: 0.6] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 03/31/2019] [Revised: 02/17/2020] [Accepted: 03/04/2020] [Indexed: 11/25/2022]
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16
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Soley G, Sebastian-Galles N. Infants' expectations about the recipients of infant-directed and adult-directed speech. Cognition 2020; 198:104214. [PMID: 32058101 DOI: 10.1016/j.cognition.2020.104214] [Citation(s) in RCA: 5] [Impact Index Per Article: 1.0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 09/18/2019] [Revised: 01/27/2020] [Accepted: 01/29/2020] [Indexed: 11/19/2022]
Abstract
Across cultures, adults produce infant-directed speech (IDS) when addressing infants. We explored whether infants expect IDS to be directed at infants and adult-directed speech (ADS) to adults. Infants from Spain and Turkey (12-15 months) watched animated videos with geometric figures, where one adult figure talked to an infant or another adult figure, while they were gazing at each other (Experiments 1 and 2). In some events, the adult figure addressed the infant figure with IDS, or the other adult figure with ADS (congruent); and in others, the same adult figure addressed the other adult figure with IDS or the infant figure with ADS (incongruent). Both groups of infants showed greater looking at incongruent than congruent events. This preference disappeared when the two figures gazed away from each other (Experiment 3). Thus, by 12 months of age, infants have nuanced expectations that different speech registers such as IDS and ADS are appropriate for addressing different recipients in third-party communicative contexts.
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Affiliation(s)
- Gaye Soley
- Department of Psychology, Boğaziçi University, Istanbul, Turkey.
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17
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Fisher C, Jin KS, Scott RM. The Developmental Origins of Syntactic Bootstrapping. Top Cogn Sci 2020; 12:48-77. [PMID: 31419084 PMCID: PMC7004857 DOI: 10.1111/tops.12447] [Citation(s) in RCA: 15] [Impact Index Per Article: 3.0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 06/18/2018] [Revised: 06/04/2019] [Accepted: 06/04/2019] [Indexed: 11/27/2022]
Abstract
Children use syntax to learn verbs, in a process known as syntactic bootstrapping. The structure-mapping account proposes that syntactic bootstrapping begins with a universal bias to map each noun phrase in a sentence onto a participant role in a structured conceptual representation of an event. Equipped with this bias, children interpret the number of noun phrases accompanying a new verb as evidence about the semantic predicate-argument structure of the sentence, and therefore about the meaning of the verb. In this paper, we first review evidence for the structure-mapping account, and then discuss challenges to the account arising from the existence of languages that allow verbs' arguments to be omitted, such as Korean. These challenges prompt us to (a) refine our notion of the distributional learning mechanisms that create representations of sentence structure, and (b) propose that an expectation of discourse continuity allows children to gather linguistic evidence for each verb's arguments across sentences in a coherent discourse. Taken together, the proposed learning mechanisms and biases sketch a route whereby simple aspects of sentence structure guide verb learning from the start of multi-word sentence comprehension, and do so even if some of the new verb's arguments are omitted due to discourse redundancy.
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Affiliation(s)
- Cynthia Fisher
- Department of Psychology, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
| | - Kyong-Sun Jin
- Department of Psychology, Sungshin Women's University
| | - Rose M Scott
- Psychological Sciences, University of California Merced
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18
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Abstract
Language is a fundamentally social endeavor. Pragmatics is the study of how speakers and listeners use social reasoning to go beyond the literal meanings of words to interpret language in context. In this article, we take a pragmatic perspective on language development and argue for developmental continuity between early nonverbal communication, language learning, and linguistic pragmatics. We link phenomena from these different literatures by relating them to a computational framework (the rational speech act framework), which conceptualizes communication as fundamentally inferential and grounded in social cognition. The model specifies how different information sources (linguistic utterances, social cues, common ground) are combined when making pragmatic inferences. We present evidence in favor of this inferential view and review how pragmatic reasoning supports children's learning, comprehension, and use of language.
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Affiliation(s)
- Manuel Bohn
- Department of Psychology, Stanford University, Stanford, California 94305, USA
- Leipzig Research Center for Early Child Development, Leipzig University, 04109 Leipzig, Germany
| | - Michael C. Frank
- Department of Psychology, Stanford University, Stanford, California 94305, USA
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Vivona JM. The Interpersonal Words of the Infant: Implications of Current Infant Language Research for Psychoanalytic Theories of Infant Development, Language, and Therapeutic Action. THE PSYCHOANALYTIC QUARTERLY 2019. [DOI: 10.1080/00332828.2019.1652048] [Citation(s) in RCA: 1] [Impact Index Per Article: 0.2] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 10/25/2022]
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Hoemann K, Xu F, Barrett LF. Emotion words, emotion concepts, and emotional development in children: A constructionist hypothesis. Dev Psychol 2019; 55:1830-1849. [PMID: 31464489 PMCID: PMC6716622 DOI: 10.1037/dev0000686] [Citation(s) in RCA: 114] [Impact Index Per Article: 19.0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 12/13/2022]
Abstract
In this article, we integrate two constructionist approaches-the theory of constructed emotion and rational constructivism-to introduce several novel hypotheses for understanding emotional development. We first discuss the hypothesis that emotion categories are abstract and conceptual, whose instances share a goal-based function in a particular context but are highly variable in their affective, physical, and perceptual features. Next, we discuss the possibility that emotional development is the process of developing emotion concepts, and that emotion words may be a critical part of this process. We hypothesize that infants and children learn emotion categories the way they learn other abstract conceptual categories-by observing others use the same emotion word to label highly variable events. Finally, we hypothesize that emotional development can be understood as a concept construction problem: a child becomes capable of experiencing and perceiving emotion only when her brain develops the capacity to assemble ad hoc, situated emotion concepts for the purposes of guiding behavior and giving meaning to sensory inputs. Specifically, we offer a predictive processing account of emotional development. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).
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Affiliation(s)
- Katie Hoemann
- Department of Psychology, Northeastern University, Boston, MA
| | - Fei Xu
- Department of Psychology, University of California Berkeley, Berkeley, CA
| | - Lisa Feldman Barrett
- Department of Psychology, Northeastern University, Boston, MA
- Department of Psychiatry, Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, MA
- Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, Charlestown, MA
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Patzwald C, Elsner B. Do as I say - or as I do?! How 18- and 24-month-olds integrate words and actions to infer intentions in situations of match or mismatch. Infant Behav Dev 2019; 55:46-57. [DOI: 10.1016/j.infbeh.2019.03.004] [Citation(s) in RCA: 2] [Impact Index Per Article: 0.3] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 07/18/2018] [Revised: 03/17/2019] [Accepted: 03/18/2019] [Indexed: 10/27/2022]
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22
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Toddlers with Autism Spectrum Disorder Can Use Language to Update Their Expectations About the World. J Autism Dev Disord 2019; 49:429-440. [PMID: 30136111 DOI: 10.1007/s10803-018-3706-7] [Citation(s) in RCA: 1] [Impact Index Per Article: 0.2] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 10/28/2022]
Abstract
This study examined if two-year-olds with ASD can update mental representations on the basis of verbal input. In an eye-tracking study, toddlers with ASD and typically-developing nonverbal age-matched controls were exposed to visual or verbal information about a change in a recently encoded scene, followed by an outcome that was either congruent or incongruent with that information. Findings revealed that both groups looked longer at incongruent outcomes, regardless of information modality, and despite the fact that toddlers with ASD had significantly lower measured verbal abilities than TD toddlers. This demonstrates that, although there is heterogeneity on the individual level, young toddlers with ASD can succeed in updating their mental representations on the basis of verbal input in a low-demand task.
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Vouloumanos A, Bryant GA. Five-month-old infants detect affiliation in colaughter. Sci Rep 2019; 9:4158. [PMID: 30858390 PMCID: PMC6411856 DOI: 10.1038/s41598-019-38954-4] [Citation(s) in RCA: 7] [Impact Index Per Article: 1.2] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Download PDF] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 07/26/2018] [Accepted: 01/15/2019] [Indexed: 11/10/2022] Open
Abstract
Colaughter-simultaneous laughter between two or more individuals-allows listeners across different cultures and languages to quickly evaluate affiliation within a social group. We examined whether infants are sensitive to acoustic information in colaughter that indicates affiliation, specifically whether they can differentiate colaughter between friends and colaughter between strangers. In the first experiment, infants who heard alternating trials of colaughter between friends and strangers listened longer to colaughter between friends. In the second experiment, we examined whether infants were sensitive to the social context that was appropriate for each type of colaughter. Infants heard colaughter between friends and colaughter between strangers preceded by a silent visual scene depicting one of two different social contexts: either two people affiliating or turning away from each other. Infants looked longer when the social scene was incongruent with the type of colaughter. By 5 months, infants preferentially listen to colaughter between friends and detect when colaughter does not match the valence of a social interaction. The ability to rapidly evaluate acoustic features in colaughter that reveal social relationships between novel individuals appears early in human infancy and might be the product of an adaptive affiliation detection system that uses vocal cues.
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Affiliation(s)
| | - Gregory A Bryant
- Department of Communication, University of California at Los Angeles, Los Angeles, California, USA
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24
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Palmquist CM, Fierro MG. The Right Stuff: Preschoolers Generalize Reliability Across Communicative Domains When Informants Show Semantic (Not Episodic) Knowledge. JOURNAL OF COGNITION AND DEVELOPMENT 2018. [DOI: 10.1080/15248372.2018.1526174] [Citation(s) in RCA: 4] [Impact Index Per Article: 0.6] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 10/28/2022]
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25
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Yamashiro A, Vouloumanos A. How do infants and adults process communicative events in real time? J Exp Child Psychol 2018; 173:268-283. [PMID: 29772454 PMCID: PMC6104386 DOI: 10.1016/j.jecp.2018.04.011] [Citation(s) in RCA: 3] [Impact Index Per Article: 0.4] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 11/27/2017] [Revised: 04/04/2018] [Accepted: 04/18/2018] [Indexed: 10/16/2022]
Abstract
Speech allows humans to communicate and to navigate the social world. By 12 months, infants recognize that speech elicits appropriate responses from others. However, it is unclear how infants process dynamic communicative scenes and how their processing abilities compare with those of adults. Do infants, like adults, process communicative events while the event is occurring or only after being presented with the outcome? We examined 12-month-olds' and adults' eye movements as they watched a Communicator grasp one (target) of two objects. During the test event, the Communicator could no longer reach the objects, so she spoke or coughed to a Listener, who selected either object. Infants' and adults' patterns of looking to the actors and objects revealed that both groups immediately evaluated the Communicator's speech, but not her cough, as communicative and recognized that the Listener should select the target object only when the Communicator spoke. Furthermore, infants and adults shifted their attention between the actors and the objects in very similar ways. This suggests that 12-month-olds can quickly process communicative events as they occur with adult-like accuracy. However, differences in looking reveal that 12-month-olds process slower than adults. This early developing processing ability may allow infants to learn language and acquire knowledge from communicative interactions.
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Affiliation(s)
- Amy Yamashiro
- Department of Psychology, New York University, New York, NY 10003, USA.
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Abstract
Pragmatic theories of communication assume that humans evolved a species-unique inferential capacity to express and recognize intentions via communicative actions. We show that 13-month-old non-verbal infants can interpret the turn-taking exchange of variable tone sequences between unfamiliar agents as indicative of communicative transfer of goal-relevant information from a knowledgeable to a naïve agent pursuing the goal. No such inference of information transfer was drawn by the infants, however, when a) the agents exchanged fully predictable identical signal sequences, which does not enable transmission of new information, or b) when no goal-relevant contextual change was observed that would motivate its communicative transmission. These results demonstrate that young infants can recognize communicative interactions between third-party agents and possess an evolved capacity for communicative mind-reading that enables them to infer what contextually relevant information has been transmitted between the agents even without language.
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Affiliation(s)
- Tibor Tauzin
- Cognitive Science Department, Central European University, Budapest, Hungary.
| | - György Gergely
- Cognitive Science Department, Central European University, Budapest, Hungary
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28
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Osina MA, Saylor MM, Ganea PA. Infants Use Category Label Knowledge to Interpret Absent Reference. INFANCY 2018. [DOI: 10.1111/infa.12241] [Citation(s) in RCA: 2] [Impact Index Per Article: 0.3] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 11/26/2022]
Affiliation(s)
- Maria A. Osina
- Department of Psychology and Human Development; Vanderbilt University
| | - Megan M. Saylor
- Department of Psychology and Human Development; Vanderbilt University
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29
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Vouloumanos A. Voulez-vous jouer avec moi? Twelve-month-olds understand that foreign languages can communicate. Cognition 2018; 173:87-92. [PMID: 29358091 PMCID: PMC5801064 DOI: 10.1016/j.cognition.2018.01.002] [Citation(s) in RCA: 6] [Impact Index Per Article: 0.9] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 08/10/2017] [Revised: 12/21/2017] [Accepted: 01/04/2018] [Indexed: 10/18/2022]
Abstract
Infants understand that speech in their native language allows speakers to communicate. Is this understanding limited to their native language or does it extend to non-native languages with which infants have no experience? Twelve-month-old infants saw an actor, the Communicator, repeatedly select one of two objects. When the Communicator could no longer reach the target but a Recipient could, the Communicator vocalized a nonsense phrase either in English (infants' native language), Spanish (rhythmically different), or Russian (phonotactically different), or hummed (a non-speech vocalization). Across all three languages, native and non-native, but not humming, infants looked longer when the Recipient gave the Communicator the non-target object. Although, by 12 months, infants do not readily map non-native words to objects or discriminate most non-native speech contrasts, they understand that non-native languages can transfer information to others. Understanding language as a tool for communication extends beyond infants' native language: By 12 months, infants view language as a universal mechanism for transferring and acquiring new information.
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Affiliation(s)
- Athena Vouloumanos
- Department of Psychology, New York University, 6 Washington Place, New York, NY 10003, United States.
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30
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Infants' understanding of the definite/indefinite article in a third-party communicative situation. Cognition 2018; 175:69-76. [PMID: 29475192 DOI: 10.1016/j.cognition.2018.02.006] [Citation(s) in RCA: 2] [Impact Index Per Article: 0.3] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 09/20/2016] [Revised: 01/17/2018] [Accepted: 02/06/2018] [Indexed: 11/23/2022]
Abstract
The present study examines how infants use their emergent perspective-taking and language comprehension abilities to make sense of interactions between two human agents. In the study, one agent (Agent1) could see only one of two identical balls on an apparatus because of a screen obstructing her view while the infant and another agent (Agent2) could see both balls. 19-month-old English-learning monolingual infants seemed to expect Agent2 to grasp the ball visible to Agent1 when she said to Agent2 "Give me the ball" but not when she said "Give me a ball." 14-month-olds appeared to accept that Agent2 could grasp either ball when Agent1 said "Give me the ball." Therefore, by 19 months of age, English-learning infants seem to attend to the specific linguistic units used, e.g., the definite article, to identify the referent of others' speech. Possible reasons in connection with language acquisition processes and/or environmental factors for the two age groups' respective failures with the definite and the indefinite articles are discussed.
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Abstract
Human language, a signature of our species, derives its power from its links to human cognition. For centuries, scholars have been captivated by this link between language and cognition. In this article, we shift this focus. Adopting a developmental lens, we review recent evidence that sheds light on the origin and developmental unfolding of the link between language and cognition in the first year of life. This evidence, which reveals the joint contributions of infants' innate capacities and their sensitivity to experience, highlights how a precocious link between language and cognition advances infants beyond their initial perceptual and conceptual capacities. The evidence also identifies the conceptual advantages this link brings to human infants. By tracing the emergence of a language-cognition link in infancy, this article reveals a dynamic developmental cascade in infants' first year, with each developmental advance providing a foundation for subsequent advances.
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Affiliation(s)
- Danielle R Perszyk
- Department of Psychology, Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois 60208; ,
| | - Sandra R Waxman
- Department of Psychology, Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois 60208; ,
- Institute for Policy Research, Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois 60208
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32
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Alternatives and Inferences in the Communication of Meaning. PSYCHOLOGY OF LEARNING AND MOTIVATION 2018. [DOI: 10.1016/bs.plm.2018.08.012] [Citation(s) in RCA: 2] [Impact Index Per Article: 0.3] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Track Full Text] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 12/24/2022]
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Afshordi N, Sullivan KR, Markson L. Children’s Third-Party Understanding of Communicative Interactions in a Foreign Language. COLLABRA: PSYCHOLOGY 2018. [DOI: 10.1525/collabra.105] [Citation(s) in RCA: 1] [Impact Index Per Article: 0.1] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 11/17/2022] Open
Abstract
Two studies explored young children’s understanding of the role of shared language in communication by investigating how monolingual English-speaking children interact with an English speaker, a Spanish speaker, and a bilingual experimenter who spoke both English and Spanish. When the bilingual experimenter spoke in Spanish or English to request objects, four-year-old children, but not three-year-olds, used her language choice to determine whom she addressed (e.g. requests in Spanish were directed to the Spanish speaker). Importantly, children used this cue – language choice – only in a communicative context. The findings suggest that by four years, monolingual children recognize that speaking the same language enables successful communication, even when that language is unfamiliar to them. Three-year-old children’s failure to make this distinction suggests that this capacity likely undergoes significant development in early childhood, although other capacities might also be at play.
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Affiliation(s)
- Narges Afshordi
- Washington University, Saint Louis, US
- Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, US
| | - Kathleen R. Sullivan
- Washington University, Saint Louis, US
- US Department of Health and Human Services, US
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Mascaro O, Morin O, Sperber D. Optimistic expectations about communication explain children's difficulties in hiding, lying, and mistrusting liars. JOURNAL OF CHILD LANGUAGE 2017; 44:1041-1064. [PMID: 27748210 DOI: 10.1017/s0305000916000350] [Citation(s) in RCA: 7] [Impact Index Per Article: 0.9] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [MESH Headings] [Track Full Text] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 06/06/2023]
Abstract
We suggest that preschoolers' frequent obliviousness to the risks and opportunities of deception comes from a trusting stance supporting verbal communication. Three studies (N = 125) confirm this hypothesis. Three-year-olds can hide information from others (Study 1) and they can lie (Study 2) in simple settings. Yet when one introduces the possibility of informing others in the very same settings, three-year-olds tend to be honest (Studies 1 and 2). Similarly, four-year-olds, though capable of treating assertions as false, trust deceptive informants (Study 3). We suggest that children's reduced sensitivity to the opportunities of lying, and to the risks of being lied to might help explain their difficulties on standard false belief tasks.
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Affiliation(s)
- Olivier Mascaro
- Institut des Sciences Cognitives Marc Jeannerod (CNRS UMR5304/Université de Lyon);Central European University,Budapest;Jean Nicod Institute (CNRS UMR8129),Paris
| | - Olivier Morin
- Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History,Jena;Central European University,Budapest;Jean Nicod Institute (CNRS UMR8129),Paris
| | - Dan Sperber
- Central European University,Budapest;Jean Nicod Institute (CNRS UMR8129),Paris
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35
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Abstract
Humans acquire much of their knowledge from the testimony of other people. An understanding of the way that information can be conveyed via gesture and vocalization is present in infancy. Thus, infants seek information from well-informed interlocutors, supply information to the ignorant, and make sense of communicative acts that they observe from a third-party perspective. This basic understanding is refined in the course of development. As they age, children's reasoning about testimony increasingly reflects an ability not just to detect imperfect or inaccurate claims but also to assess what inferences may or may not be drawn about informants given their particular situation. Children also attend to the broader characteristics of particular informants-their group membership, personality characteristics, and agreement or disagreement with other potential informants. When presented with unexpected or counterintuitive testimony, children are prone to set aside their own prior convictions, but they may sometimes defer to informants for inherently social reasons.
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Affiliation(s)
- Paul L Harris
- Graduate School of Education, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138;
| | - Melissa A Koenig
- Institute of Child Development, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, Minnesota 55436;
| | | | - Vikram K Jaswal
- Department of Psychology, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Virginia 22904;
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36
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Abstract
A great deal of attention has recently been paid to gesture and its effects on thinking and learning. It is well established that the hand movements that accompany speech are an integral part of communication, ubiquitous across cultures, and a unique feature of human behavior. In an attempt to understand this intriguing phenomenon, researchers have focused on pinpointing the mechanisms that underlie gesture production. One proposal--that gesture arises from simulated action (Hostetter & Alibali Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 15, 495-514, 2008)--has opened up discussions about action, gesture, and the relation between the two. However, there is another side to understanding a phenomenon and that is to understand its function. A phenomenon's function is its purpose rather than its precipitating cause--the why rather than the how. This paper sets forth a theoretical framework for exploring why gesture serves the functions that it does, and reviews where the current literature fits, and fails to fit, this proposal. Our framework proposes that whether or not gesture is simulated action in terms of its mechanism--it is clearly not reducible to action in terms of its function. Most notably, because gestures are abstracted representations and are not actions tied to particular events and objects, they can play a powerful role in thinking and learning beyond the particular, specifically, in supporting generalization and transfer of knowledge.
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Affiliation(s)
- Miriam A Novack
- Department of Psychology, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, 60637, USA.
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37
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Martin A, Shelton CC, Sommerville JA. Once a frog-lover, always a frog-lover?: Infants' goal generalization is influenced by the nature of accompanying speech. J Exp Psychol Gen 2017; 146:859-871. [PMID: 28425744 PMCID: PMC5453825 DOI: 10.1037/xge0000268] [Citation(s) in RCA: 4] [Impact Index Per Article: 0.5] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 11/08/2022]
Abstract
The ability to interpret choices as enduring preferences that generalize beyond the immediate situation gives adults a powerful means of predicting and explaining others' behavior. How do infants come to recognize that current choices can be driven by generalizable preferences? Although infants can encode others' actions in terms of goals (Woodward, 1998), there is evidence that 10-month-olds still fail to generalize goal information presented in one environment to an event sequence occurring in a new environment (Sommerville & Crane, 2009). Are there some circumstances in which infants interpret others' goals as generalizable across environments? We investigate whether the vocalizations a person produces while selecting an object in one room influences infants' generalization of the goal to a new room. Ten-month-olds did not spontaneously generalize the actor's goal, but did generalize the actor's goal when the actor initially accompanied her object selection with a statement of preference. Infants' generalization was not driven by the attention-grabbing features of the statement or the mere use of language, as they did not generalize when the actor used matched nonspeech vocalizations or sung speech. Infants interpreted the goal as person-specific, as they did not generalize the choice to a new actor. We suggest that the referential specificity of accompanying speech vocalizations influences infants' tendency to interpret a choice as personal rather than situational. (PsycINFO Database Record
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Affiliation(s)
- Alia Martin
- University of Washington, Victoria University of Wellington
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38
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Abstract
Language exerts a powerful influence on our concepts. We review evidence documenting the developmental origins of a precocious link between language and object categories in very young infants. This collection of studies documents a cascading process in which early links between language and cognition provide the foundation for later, more precise ones. We propose that, early in life, language promotes categorization at least in part through its status as a social, communicative signal. But over the first year, infants home in on the referential power of language and, by their second year, begin teasing apart distinct kinds of names (e.g. nouns, adjectives) and their relation to distinct kinds of concepts (e.g. object categories, properties). To complement this proposal, we also relate this evidence to several alternative accounts of language's effect on categorization, appealing to similarity ('labels-as-features'), familiarity ('auditory overshadowing'), and communicative biases ('natural pedagogy').
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39
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Horowitz AC, Frank MC. Children's Pragmatic Inferences as a Route for Learning About the World. Child Dev 2017; 87:807-19. [PMID: 27189407 DOI: 10.1111/cdev.12527] [Citation(s) in RCA: 13] [Impact Index Per Article: 1.6] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 11/27/2022]
Abstract
This study investigated whether children can infer category properties based on how a speaker describes an individual (e.g., saying something is a "small zib" implies that zibs are generally bigger than this one). Three- to 5-year-olds (N = 264) from a university preschool and a children's museum were tested on their ability to make this sort of contrast inference. Children made some inferences from adjective choice alone (Experiment 1); performance increased as more cues to contrast were added (Experiments 2 and 3). Control studies show that these findings are not due to the particular properties used or the structure of these tasks (Experiments 4 and 5). These findings suggest that sensitivity to speakers' production choices may help children learn about the world.
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40
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Yurovsky D, Frank MC. Beyond naïve cue combination: salience and social cues in early word learning. Dev Sci 2017; 20:10.1111/desc.12349. [PMID: 26575408 PMCID: PMC4870162 DOI: 10.1111/desc.12349] [Citation(s) in RCA: 57] [Impact Index Per Article: 7.1] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 08/13/2014] [Accepted: 06/17/2015] [Indexed: 11/29/2022]
Abstract
Children learn their earliest words through social interaction, but it is unknown how much they rely on social information. Some theories argue that word learning is fundamentally social from its outset, with even the youngest infants understanding intentions and using them to infer a social partner's target of reference. In contrast, other theories argue that early word learning is largely a perceptual process in which young children map words onto salient objects. One way of unifying these accounts is to model word learning as weighted cue combination, in which children attend to many potential cues to reference, but only gradually learn the correct weight to assign each cue. We tested four predictions of this kind of naïve cue combination account, using an eye-tracking paradigm that combines social word teaching and two-alternative forced-choice testing. None of the predictions were supported. We thus propose an alternative unifying account: children are sensitive to social information early, but their ability to gather and deploy this information is constrained by domain-general cognitive processes. Developmental changes in children's use of social cues emerge not from learning the predictive power of social cues, but from the gradual development of attention, memory, and speed of information processing.
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41
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McGillion M, Herbert JS, Pine J, Vihman M, dePaolis R, Keren-Portnoy T, Matthews D. What Paves the Way to Conventional Language? The Predictive Value of Babble, Pointing, and Socioeconomic Status. Child Dev 2016; 88:156-166. [DOI: 10.1111/cdev.12671] [Citation(s) in RCA: 89] [Impact Index Per Article: 9.9] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 11/29/2022]
Affiliation(s)
| | | | - Julian Pine
- University of Liverpool
- ESRC International Centre for Language and Communicative Development (LuCiD)
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42
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Ganea PA, Fitch A, Harris PL, Kaldy Z. Sixteen-month-olds can use language to update their expectations about the visual world. J Exp Child Psychol 2016; 151:65-76. [DOI: 10.1016/j.jecp.2015.12.005] [Citation(s) in RCA: 10] [Impact Index Per Article: 1.1] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 05/30/2015] [Revised: 12/09/2015] [Accepted: 12/14/2015] [Indexed: 12/01/2022]
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43
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Goodman ND, Frank MC. Pragmatic Language Interpretation as Probabilistic Inference. Trends Cogn Sci 2016; 20:818-829. [DOI: 10.1016/j.tics.2016.08.005] [Citation(s) in RCA: 113] [Impact Index Per Article: 12.6] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 07/07/2016] [Revised: 08/09/2016] [Accepted: 08/09/2016] [Indexed: 10/20/2022]
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44
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Perszyk DR, Waxman SR. Listening to the calls of the wild: The role of experience in linking language and cognition in young infants. Cognition 2016; 153:175-81. [PMID: 27209387 PMCID: PMC5134735 DOI: 10.1016/j.cognition.2016.05.004] [Citation(s) in RCA: 11] [Impact Index Per Article: 1.2] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 07/10/2015] [Revised: 05/06/2016] [Accepted: 05/09/2016] [Indexed: 10/21/2022]
Abstract
Well before they understand their first words, infants have begun to link language and cognition. This link is initially broad: At 3months, listening to both human and nonhuman primate vocalizations supports infants' object categorization, a building block of cognition. But by 6months, the link has narrowed: Only human vocalizations support categorization. What mechanisms underlie this rapid tuning process? Here, we document the crucial role of infants' experience as infants tune this link to cognition. Merely exposing infants to nonhuman primate vocalizations permits them to preserve, rather than sever, the link between these signals and categorization. Exposing infants to backward speech-a signal that fails to support categorization in the first year of life-does not have this advantage. This new evidence illuminates the central role of early experience as infants specify which signals, from an initially broad set, they will continue to link to core cognitive capacities.
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Affiliation(s)
- Danielle R Perszyk
- Department of Psychology, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL 60208, United States.
| | - Sandra R Waxman
- Department of Psychology, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL 60208, United States
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45
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He J, Jin X, Li Z, Zheng L, Sun Z, Zhang M, Shen M. Infants' Understanding of Information Transmission in the Context of Communication Involving Multiple Agents. INFANCY 2015. [DOI: 10.1111/infa.12105] [Citation(s) in RCA: 2] [Impact Index Per Article: 0.2] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 11/29/2022]
Affiliation(s)
- Jie He
- Department of Psychology and Behavioral Sciences; Zhejiang University
| | - Xinyi Jin
- Department of Psychology and Behavioral Sciences; Zhejiang University
| | - Zhuyun Li
- Department of Psychology and Behavioral Sciences; Zhejiang University
| | - Lei Zheng
- School of Medicine; The Children's Hospital of Zhejiang University
| | - Zhongqiang Sun
- Department of Psychology and Behavioral Sciences; Zhejiang University
| | - Meng Zhang
- Department of Psychology and Behavioral Sciences; Zhejiang University
| | - Mowei Shen
- Department of Psychology and Behavioral Sciences; Zhejiang University
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Pitts CE, Onishi KH, Vouloumanos A. Who can communicate with whom? Language experience affects infants’ evaluation of others as monolingual or multilingual. Cognition 2015; 134:185-92. [PMID: 25460391 DOI: 10.1016/j.cognition.2014.10.003] [Citation(s) in RCA: 14] [Impact Index Per Article: 1.4] [Reference Citation Analysis] [MESH Headings] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 10/08/2013] [Revised: 09/30/2014] [Accepted: 10/01/2014] [Indexed: 11/16/2022]
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Vouloumanos A, Waxman SR. Listen up! Speech is for thinking during infancy. Trends Cogn Sci 2014; 18:642-6. [PMID: 25457376 DOI: 10.1016/j.tics.2014.10.001] [Citation(s) in RCA: 43] [Impact Index Per Article: 3.9] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 05/21/2014] [Revised: 09/15/2014] [Accepted: 10/02/2014] [Indexed: 11/27/2022]
Abstract
Infants' exposure to human speech within the first year promotes more than speech processing and language acquisition: new developmental evidence suggests that listening to speech shapes infants' fundamental cognitive and social capacities. Speech streamlines infants' learning, promotes the formation of object categories, signals communicative partners, highlights information in social interactions, and offers insight into the minds of others. These results, which challenge the claim that for infants, speech offers no special cognitive advantages, suggest a new synthesis. Far earlier than researchers had imagined, an intimate and powerful connection between human speech and cognition guides infant development, advancing infants' acquisition of fundamental psychological processes.
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Affiliation(s)
- Athena Vouloumanos
- Department of Psychology, New York University, 6 Washington Place, New York, NY, 10003-6603, USA.
| | - Sandra R Waxman
- Department of Psychology, Institute for Policy Research, Northwestern University, 2029 Sheridan Road, Evanston, IL 60208-2710, USA
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Harris PL, Lane JD. Infants Understand How Testimony Works. TOPOI : AN INTERNATIONAL REVIEW OF PHILOSOPHY 2014; 33:443-458. [PMID: 35874967 PMCID: PMC9306287 DOI: 10.1007/s11245-013-9180-0] [Citation(s) in RCA: 38] [Impact Index Per Article: 3.5] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 06/13/2023]
Abstract
Children learn about the world from the testimony of other people, often coming to accept what they are told about a variety of unobservable and indeed counterintuitive phenomena. However, research on children's learning from testimony has paid limited attention to the foundations of that capacity. We ask whether those foundations can be observed in infancy. We review evidence from two areas of research: infants' sensitivity to the emotional expressions of other people; and their capacity to understand the exchange of information through non-verbal gestures and vocalization. We conclude that a grasp of the bi-directional exchange of information is present early in the second year. We discuss the implications for future research, especially across different cultural settings.
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Krehm M, Onishi KH, Vouloumanos A. I See Your Point: Infants Under 12 Months Understand That Pointing Is Communicative. JOURNAL OF COGNITION AND DEVELOPMENT 2014. [DOI: 10.1080/15248372.2012.736112] [Citation(s) in RCA: 10] [Impact Index Per Article: 0.9] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 10/24/2022]
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