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      Connecting the tots: Strong looking‐pointing correlations in preschoolers' word learning and implications for continuity in language development

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      Child Development
      John Wiley and Sons Inc.

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          Abstract

          How does one assess developmental change when the measures themselves change with development? Most developmental studies of word learning use either looking (infants) or pointing (preschoolers and older). With little empirical evidence of the relationship between the two measures, developmental change is difficult to assess. This paper analyzes 914 pointing, looking children (451 female, varied ethnicities, 2.5–6.5 years, dates: 2009–2019) in 36 word‐ or sound‐learning experiments with two‐alternative test trials. Looking proportions and pointing accuracy correlated strongly ( r = .7). Counter to the “looks first” hypothesis, looks were not sensitive to incipient knowledge that pointing missed: when pointing is at chance, looking proportions are also. Results suggest one possible path forward for assessing continuous developmental change. Methodological best practices are discussed.

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          Most cited references74

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          At 6-9 months, human infants know the meanings of many common nouns.

          It is widely accepted that infants begin learning their native language not by learning words, but by discovering features of the speech signal: consonants, vowels, and combinations of these sounds. Learning to understand words, as opposed to just perceiving their sounds, is said to come later, between 9 and 15 mo of age, when infants develop a capacity for interpreting others' goals and intentions. Here, we demonstrate that this consensus about the developmental sequence of human language learning is flawed: in fact, infants already know the meanings of several common words from the age of 6 mo onward. We presented 6- to 9-mo-old infants with sets of pictures to view while their parent named a picture in each set. Over this entire age range, infants directed their gaze to the named pictures, indicating their understanding of spoken words. Because the words were not trained in the laboratory, the results show that even young infants learn ordinary words through daily experience with language. This surprising accomplishment indicates that, contrary to prevailing beliefs, either infants can already grasp the referential intentions of adults at 6 mo or infants can learn words before this ability emerges. The precocious discovery of word meanings suggests a perspective in which learning vocabulary and learning the sound structure of spoken language go hand in hand as language acquisition begins.
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            The Roles of Vision and Eye Movements in the Control of Activities of Daily Living

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              Incremental interpretation at verbs: restricting the domain of subsequent reference.

              Participants' eye movements were recorded as they inspected a semi-realistic visual scene showing a boy, a cake, and various distractor objects. Whilst viewing this scene, they heard sentences such as 'the boy will move the cake' or 'the boy will eat the cake'. The cake was the only edible object portrayed in the scene. In each of two experiments, the onset of saccadic eye movements to the target object (the cake) was significantly later in the move condition than in the eat condition; saccades to the target were launched after the onset of the spoken word cake in the move condition, but before its onset in the eat condition. The results suggest that information at the verb can be used to restrict the domain within the context to which subsequent reference will be made by the (as yet unencountered) post-verbal grammatical object. The data support a hypothesis in which sentence processing is driven by the predictive relationships between verbs, their syntactic arguments, and the real-world contexts in which they occur.
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                Author and article information

                Contributors
                screel@ucsd.edu
                Journal
                Child Dev
                Child Dev
                10.1111/(ISSN)1467-8624
                CDEV
                Child Development
                John Wiley and Sons Inc. (Hoboken )
                0009-3920
                1467-8624
                21 August 2024
                Jan-Feb 2025
                : 96
                : 1 ( doiID: 10.1111/cdev.v96.1 )
                : 87-103
                Affiliations
                [ 1 ] Department of Cognitive Science La Jolla California USA
                Author notes
                [*] [* ] Correspondence

                Sarah C. Creel, Department of Cognitive Science, 9500 Gilman Drive Mail Code 0515, La Jolla, CA 92093‐0515, USA.

                Email: screel@ 123456ucsd.edu

                Author information
                https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1891-4228
                Article
                CDEV14157 2024-0046.R2
                10.1111/cdev.14157
                11693829
                39169637
                a1059791-1d44-4f08-a638-95ac22d9444d
                © 2024 The Author(s). Child Development published by Wiley Periodicals LLC on behalf of Society for Research in Child Development.

                This is an open access article under the terms of the http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited and is not used for commercial purposes.

                History
                Page count
                Figures: 6, Tables: 2, Pages: 17, Words: 11900
                Funding
                Funded by: Division of Behavioral and Cognitive Sciences , doi 10.13039/100000169;
                Award ID: BCS‐1057080
                Award ID: BCS‐1230003
                Categories
                Empirical Article
                Empirical Article
                Custom metadata
                2.0
                January/February 2025
                Converter:WILEY_ML3GV2_TO_JATSPMC version:6.5.1 mode:remove_FC converted:01.01.2025

                Clinical Psychology & Psychiatry
                Clinical Psychology & Psychiatry

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