The birth of words: ten-month-olds learn words through perceptual salience.
A core task in language acquisition is mapping words onto objects, actions, and events. Two studies investigated how children learn to map novel labels onto novel objects. Study 1 investigated whether 10-month-olds use both perceptual and social cues to learn a word. Study 2, a control study, tested whether infants paired the label with a particular spatial location rather than to an object. Results show that 10-month-olds can learn new labels and do so by relying on the perceptual salience of an object instead of social cues provided by a speaker. This is in direct contrast to the way in which older children (12-, 18-, and 24-month-olds) learn and extend new object names.
Pruden
Shannon M
SM
Temple University, PA 19122, USA.
Hirsh-Pasek
Kathy
K
Golinkoff
Roberta Michnick
RM
Hennon
Elizabeth A
EA
D002657:Child Development; D002663:Child Language; D003463:Cues; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007223:Infant; D008297:Male; D010465:Perception; D014706:Verbal Learning; D014825:Vocabulary