Conflicting Social Cues: Fourteen- and 24-Month-Old Infants' Reliance on Gaze and Pointing Cues in Word Learning

Language acquisition is a process embedded in social routines. Despite considerable attention in research to its social nature, little is known about developmental differences in the relative priority of certain social cues over others during early word learning. Employing an eye-tracking paradigm, we presented 14-month-old infants, 24-month-old infants, and adults with movies in which an actor repeatedly gazed at one and pointed to the other of two objects while presenting them with a novel word. The results show that the 14-month-old infants pay more attention to a model's eye gaze when learning to map a novel word to a referent, whereas 24-month-old infants and adults rely more on pointing cues. Our results provide evidence for a developmental change in the relative priority of pointing versus eye-gazing cues in language acquisition.

[1]  S. Tipper,et al.  Gaze cueing of attention: visual attention, social cognition, and individual differences. , 2007, Psychological bulletin.

[2]  Michael Morales,et al.  Following the direction of gaze and language development in 6-month-olds , 1998 .

[3]  P. Bloom.  How Children Learn the Meaning of Words and How LSA Does It ( Too ) , 2005 .

[4]  Beate Sodian,et al.  Preverbal infants' understanding of referential gestures , 2001 .

[5]  Stefanie Hoehl,et al.  What are you looking at? Infants' neural processing of an adult's object-directed eye gaze. , 2008, Developmental science.

[6]  Mark H. Johnson,et al.  Components of Visual Orienting in Early Infancy: Contingency Learning, Anticipatory Looking, and Disengaging , 1991, Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience.

[7]  Preschoolers' comprehension of pronouns and reflexives: the impact of the task* , 2011, Journal of Child Language.

[8]  G. Diesendruck,et al.  Children's use of syntactic and pragmatic knowledge in the interpretation of novel adjectives. , 2006, Child development.

[9]  B. Rogoff.  The Cultural Nature of Human Development , 2003 .

[10]  N. Emery,et al.  The eyes have it: the neuroethology, function and evolution of social gaze , 2000, Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews.

[11]  A. Woodward.  Constraining the Problem Space in Early Word Learning , 2000 .

[12]  Manuela Friedrich,et al.  Early Word Learning , 2010 .

[13]  J. Gavin Bremner,et al.  Blackwell handbook of infant development , 2004 .

[14]  N. Kirkham,et al.  No two cues are alike: Depth of learning during infancy is dependent on what orients attention. , 2010, Journal of experimental child psychology.

[15]  T. Racine,et al.  The role of shared practice in joint attention , 2007 .

[16]  M. Tomasello,et al.  Social cognition, joint attention, and communicative competence from 9 to 15 months of age. , 1998, Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development.

[17]  H. Bekkering,et al.  Ocular gaze is anchored to the target of an ongoing pointing movement. , 2000, Journal of neurophysiology.

[18]  Jon Driver,et al.  Adult's Eyes Trigger Shifts of Visual Attention in Human Infants , 1998 .

[19]  David P. Wilkins.  Why pointing with the index finger is not a universal (in sociocultural and semiotic terms). , 2003 .

[20]  Elizabeth S. Nilsen,et al.  The role of gaze direction and mutual exclusivity in guiding 24-month-olds' word mappings. , 2010, The British journal of developmental psychology.

[21]  C. Moore.  The Development of Commonsense Psychology , 2006 .

[22]  A. Pick,et al.  Effects of gesture and target on 12- and 18-month-olds' joint visual attention to objects in front of or behind them. , 2000, Developmental psychology.

[23]  Nameera Akhtar,et al.  The robustness of learning through overhearing. , 2005, Developmental science.

[24]  K. Plunkett,et al.  The use of social and salience cues in early word learning. , 2006, Journal of experimental child psychology.

[25]  S. Brennan,et al.  Speakers' eye gaze disambiguates referring expressions early during face-to-face conversation , 2007 .

[26]  Masako Hirotani,et al.  Joint attention helps infants learn new words: event-related potential evidence , 2009, Neuroreport.

[27]  M. Engelmann.  The Philosophical Investigations , 2013 .

[28]  J. J. Guajardo,et al.  Infants’ understanding of the point gesture as an object-directed action , 2002 .

[29]  Linda B. Smith,et al.  The importance of shape in early lexical learning , 1988 .

[30]  Ben Kenward,et al.  10-Month-Olds Visually Anticipate an Outcome Contingent on Their Own Action. , 2010, Infancy : the official journal of the International Society on Infant Studies.

[31]  A. Bangerter,et al.  Using Pointing and Describing to Achieve Joint Focus of Attention in Dialogue , 2004, Psychological science.

[32]  Willard Van Orman Quine,et al.  Word and Object , 1960 .

[33]  E. Blass,et al.  Biological bases of face preference in 6-week-old infants , 2003 .

[34]  I. Rumfitt,et al.  Making it Explicit: Reasoning, Representing, and Discursive Commitment. , 1997 .

[35]  Michael Tomasello,et al.  The Role of Discourse Novelty in Early Word Learning , 1996 .

[36]  S. Baron-Cohen.  The Eye Direction Detector (EDD) and the Shared Attention Mechanism (SAM): Two cases for evolutionar , 1995 .

[37]  R. Aslin,et al.  Lexical Neighborhoods and the Word-Form Representations of 14-Month-Olds , 2002, Psychological science.

[38]  B. D’Entremont,et al.  Experience with visual barriers and its effects on subsequent gaze‐following in 12‐ to 13‐month‐olds , 2006 .

[39]  Roberta Michnick Golinkoff,et al.  Becoming a word learner : a debate on lexical acquisition , 2000 .

[40]  Claes von Hofsten,et al.  Action in development. , 2007 .

[41]  D. Swingley,et al.  Contributions of infant word learning to language development , 2009, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences.

[42]  S. Bryson,et al.  Executive function in preschoolers: a review using an integrative framework. , 2008, Psychological bulletin.

[43]  M. Tomasello,et al.  One-year-olds’ understanding of nonverbal gestures directed to a third person , 2009 .

[44]  Chris Moore,et al.  Word learning in the context of referential and salience cues. , 1999 .

[45]  R. Mccall,et al.  The Genetic and Environmental Origins of Learning Abilities and Disabilities in the Early School , 2007, Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development.

[46]  M. Rothbart,et al.  Attention in Early Development: Themes and Variations , 1996 .

[47]  E. N. Sokolov.  Higher nervous functions; the orienting reflex. , 1963, Annual review of physiology.

[48]  D. Ballard,et al.  Eye movements in natural behavior , 2005, Trends in Cognitive Sciences.

[49]  Dare A. Baldwin,et al.  Early referential understanding: Infants' ability to recognize referential acts for what they are. , 1993 .

[50]  Chris Moore,et al.  The Development of Gaze Following , 2008 .

[51]  J. Colombo.  The development of visual attention in infancy. , 2001, Annual review of psychology.

[52]  H. H. Clark.  Pointing and placing. , 2003 .

[53]  G. Deák,et al.  Driven from distraction: how infants respond to parents' attempts to elicit and re-direct their attention. , 2008, Infant behavior & development.

[54]  H. Bekkering,et al.  The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology Motor Simulation in Verbal Knowledge Acquisition , 2022 .

[55]  B. Sodian,et al.  Now I see it but you don't: 14-month-olds can represent another person's visual perspective. , 2007, Developmental science.

[56]  A. Meltzoff,et al.  The development of gaze following and its relation to language. , 2005, Developmental science.

[57]  B. Sodian,et al.  Infants' Understanding of Looking, Pointing, and Reaching as Cues to Goal-Directed Action , 2004 .

[58]  Claes von Hofsten,et al.  Action in development. , 2007, Developmental science.

[59]  George Butterworth,et al.  Joint Visual Attention in Infancy , 2008 .

[60]  M. Paulus.  How infants relate looker and object: evidence for a perceptual learning account of gaze following in infancy. , 2011, Developmental science.

[61]  Linda B. Smith,et al.  Rapid Word Learning Under Uncertainty via Cross-Situational Statistics , 2007, Psychological science.

[62]  D. Muir,et al.  Gaze-following : its development and significance , 2007 .

[63]  V. Jaswal,et al.  Pointing Disrupts Preschoolers' Ability to Discriminate Between Knowledgeable and Ignorant Informants. , 2012, Cognitive development.

[64]  M. Tomasello,et al.  Young children follow pointing over words in interpreting acts of reference. , 2010, Developmental science.

[65]  Michael Tomasello,et al.  Twelve-month-olds' comprehension and production of pointing. , 2012, The British journal of developmental psychology.

[66]  Ben Kenward,et al.  The Microstructure of Infants' Gaze as They View Adult Shifts in Overt Attention , 2008 .

[67]  Marlies E. Vissers,et al.  Bridging the gap between the other and me: the functional role of motor resonance and action effects in infants' imitation. , 2011, Developmental science.

[68]  Ellen M. Markman,et al.  Categorization and Naming in Children: Problems of Induction , 1989 .

[69]  S. Kita.  Pointing: Where language, culture, and cognition meet , 2003 .

[70]  J. Carpendale,et al.  Constructing an understanding of mind: The development of children's social understanding within social interaction , 2004, Behavioral and Brain Sciences.

[71]  Julie C. Sedivy,et al.  Subject Terms: Linguistics Language Eyes & eyesight Cognition & reasoning , 1995 .

[72]  S. Baron-Cohen,et al.  Gaze Perception Triggers Reflexive Visuospatial Orienting , 1999 .

[73]  R. Johansson,et al.  Gaze behavior when reaching to remembered targets. , 2008, Journal of neurophysiology.

[74]  Jochen Triesch,et al.  Chapter 16 : Origins of shared attention in human infants , 2005 .

[75]  V. Jaswal,et al.  Preschoolers Expect Pointers (Even Ignorant Ones) to Be Knowledgeable , 2012, Psychological science.

[76]  A. Meltzoff,et al.  The importance of eyes: how infants interpret adult looking behavior. , 2002, Developmental psychology.

[77]  T. Ruffman.  Do Children Understand the Mind by Means of Simulation or a Theory? Evidence From Their Understanding of Inference , 1996 .

[78]  George Butterworth,et al.  Joint Visual Attention, Manual Pointing, and Preverbal Communication in Human Infancy , 2018, Attention and Performance XIII.

[79]  E. Eich.  Searching for Mood Dependent Memory , 1995 .

[80]  N. Akhtar,et al.  Learning words through overhearing. , 2001, Child development.

[81]  Chen Yu,et al.  A unified model of early word learning: Integrating statistical and social cues , 2007, Neurocomputing.

[82]  J.P.M. Fikkert,et al.  How does Place fall into place? The lexicon and emergent constraints in children's developing phonological grammar , 2008 .

[83]  A. Kingstone,et al.  Rethinking attentional development: reflexive and volitional orienting in children and adults. , 2009, Developmental science.

[84]  Rebecca J. Brand,et al.  Breaking the language barrier: an emergentist coalition model for the origins of word learning. , 2000, Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development.

[85]  Moritz M. Daum,et al.  The development and neural basis of pointing comprehension , 2010, Social neuroscience.

[86]  E. Markman,et al.  Rapid Word Learning in 13- and 18-Month-Olds. , 1994 .

[87]  D. Poulin-Dubois,et al.  To see or not to see: infants prefer to follow the gaze of a reliable looker. , 2008, Developmental science.