Here's looking at you, baby: What gaze and movement reveal about minimal pair word-object association at 14 months

Abstract

AbstractThe ability, or lack thereof, of 14-month-old infants to associate novel, minimal pair word-forms with novel objects in a variety of experimental settings has been a crucial research window into how infants go about the quintessential linguistic task of learning words. Here we ask whether the presence of a human interactor in the experimental setting facilitates minimal pair word-object association at this age. In addition to standard looking time measures to test this question, we also introduce the use of measures of infant movement derived by the application of an efficient algorithm that measures motion from 2D video. Infant gaze patterns across the experimental session identified two groups of infants, those engaging in more and those engaging in less mutual gaze with the Experimenter; both groups demonstrated success in the task by both looking time and movement measures. Infants did not succeed in the task by either measure when a videotaped Experimenter presented the labels. We suggest that infants at this age are in transition from being good “information consumers” to becoming good “information seekers,” and that the presence of the live Experimenter plays a crucial role in making it possible for infants to demonstrate their nascent word learning abilities. Further, we explore insights into the looking time results provided by the movement measures as well as novel contributions to our understanding of language acquisition afforded by the examination of infant movement.