title: Orienting to third-party conversations.
abstract: Children as young as two years of age are able to learn novel object labels through overhearing, even when distracted by an attractive toy (Akhtar, 2005). The present studies varied the information provided about novel objects and examined which elements (i.e. novel versus neutral information and labels versus facts) toddlers chose to monitor, and what type of information they were more likely to learn. In Study 1, participants learned only the novel label and the novel fact containing a novel label. In Study 2, only girls learned the novel label. Neither girls nor boys learned the novel fact. In both studies, analyses of children's gaze patterns suggest that children who learned the new information strategically oriented to the third-party conversation.
authors.affiliation: Psychology Department, University of California Santa Cruz, 1156 High Street, Santa Cruz, CA 95064, USA. olimpia1@ucsc.edu
authors.forename: Carmen
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Martínez-Sussmann
authors.forename: Nameera
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Akhtar
authors.forename: Gil
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Diesendruck
authors.forename: Lori
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Markson
mesh_terms: D001288:Attention; D002663:Child Language; D002675:Child, Preschool; D032882:Comprehension; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007804:Language Development; D008297:Male; D013060:Speech; D014825:Vocabulary