Abstract
abstractBy the end of their first year, infants can interpret many different types of complex dynamic visual events, such as caused-motion, chasing, and goal-directed action. Infants of this age are also in the early stages of vocabulary development, producing their first words at around 12 months. The present work examined whether there are meaningful individual differences in infants’ ability to represent dynamic causal events in visual scenes, and whether these differences influence vocabulary development. As part of the longitudinal Language 0–5 Project, 78 10-month-old infants were tested on their ability to interpret three dynamic motion events, involving (a) caused-motion, (b) chasing behaviour, and (c) goal-directed movement. Planned analyses found that infants showed evidence of understanding the first two event types, but not the third. Looking behaviour in each task was not meaningfully related to vocabulary development, nor were there any correlations between the tasks. The results of additional exploratory analyses and simulations suggested that the infants’ understanding of each event may not be predictive of their vocabulary development, and that looking times in these tasks may not be reliably capturing any meaningful individual differences in their knowledge. This raises questions about how to convert experimental group designs to individual differences measures, and how to interpret infant looking time behaviour.
Highlights
There are substantial individual differences in the age and rate at which children acquire vocabulary
The aim of the present study was to examine whether the capacity to understand complex dynamic events in the world is a contributing factor by testing these skills at the earliest stages of vocabulary development
At 9 to 10 months old, do individual differences in representations of the conceptual world form part of the explanation for the variance observed in vocabulary development?
Summary
There are substantial individual differences in the age and rate at which children acquire vocabulary. These emerge early and increase in magnitude over time (e.g., Fenson et al, 1994). Evidence from the Stanford Wordbank (http://wordbank.stanford.edu) suggests that this variance in vocabulary acquisition is a cross-linguistic phenomenon (Frank, Braginsky, Yurovsky, & Marchman, 2017); in 23 different languages, 12-month-olds on the 80th percentile produce an average of 13 words, whereas those on the 20th percentile produce around 1.23 words. At 9 to 10 months old, do individual differences in representations of the conceptual world form part of the explanation for the variance observed in vocabulary development?
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