Abstract
This study investigated whether 15-month-old infants fast map multimodal labels, and, when given the choice of two modalities, whether they preferentially fast map one better than the other. Sixty 15-month-old infants watched films where an actress repeatedly and ostensively labeled two novel objects using a spoken word along with a representational gesture. In the test phase, infants were assigned to one of three conditions: Word, Word + Gesture, or Gesture. The objects appeared in a shelf next to the experimenter and, depending on the condition, infants were prompted with either a word, a gesture, or a multimodal word–gesture combination. Using an infant eye tracker, we determined whether infants made the correct mappings. Results revealed that only infants in the Word condition had learned the novel object labels. When the representational gesture was presented alone or when the verbal label was accompanied by a representational gesture, infants did not succeed in making the correct mappings. Results reveal that 15-month-old infants do not benefit from multimodal labeling and that they prefer words over representational gestures as object labels in multimodal utterances. Findings put into question the role of multimodal labeling in early language development.
Highlights
Multimodal speech–gesture combinations are an integral part of language development
Results from the test phase showed that infants were able to map the verbal label to the referent
When the verbal label was accompanied by a representational gesture, or when the representational gesture was presented alone, infants did not succeed in identifying the correct referents
Summary
Caregivers, for example, often provide labels for infants in temporal synchrony with gestures such as pointing and showing (Ninio, 1980; Masur, 1997; Gogate et al, 2000, 2006) These multimodal speech–gesture combinations scaffold infants’ referential understanding (Iverson et al, 1999), since deictic gestures help establish joint attentional episodes which are crucial to the process of word learning (Tomasello and Farrar, 1986; Baldwin, 1991). Infants combine their own deictic gestures with words, and these speech–gesture combinations are predictive of the two-word stage (Iverson and Goldin-Meadow, 2005). Infants younger than 2 years learn arbitrary gestures as as iconic gestures, suggesting that they are not sensitive to gestural iconicity until later in development (Bates et al, 1979; Namy et al, 2004; Namy, 2008)
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