The role of gaze direction and mutual exclusivity in guiding 24-month-olds' word mappings

Susan A Graham,Kara Olineck,Elizabeth S Nilsen,Sarah Collins

doi:10.1348/026151009x424565

Abstract

In these studies, we examined how a default assumption about word meaning, the mutual exclusivity assumption and an intentional cue, gaze direction, interacted to guide 24-month-olds' object-word mappings. In Expt 1, when the experimenter's gaze was consistent with the mutual exclusivity assumption, novel word mappings were facilitated. When the experimenter's eye-gaze was in conflict with the mutual exclusivity cue, children demonstrated a tendency to rely on the mutual exclusivity assumption rather than follow the experimenter's gaze to map the label to the object. In Expt 2, children relied on the experimenter's gaze direction to successfully map both a first label to a novel object and a second label to a familiar object. Moreover, infants mapped second labels to familiar objects to the same degree that they mapped first labels to novel objects. These findings are discussed with regard to children's use of convergent and divergent cues in indirect word mapping contexts.

Highlights

In these studies, we examined how a default assumption about word meaning, the mutual exclusivity assumption and an intentional cue, gaze direction, interacted to guide 24-month-olds' object-word mappings
Thesefindingsindicate that when the experimenter s eye-gaze direction was consistent with the mutual exclusivity assumption, children's novel word mappings were facilitated by this information.'
To ensure that children in this age range wouid not have labeis for these objects, we presented 10, 2-year-oid children (4 males and 6 females, mean age — 29,00 months, SD = 4.78 with the 18 unfamiliar objects used in Expts I and 2, one at a time, and asked them to provide the name of the object Cbildren. on average, labelled 46% of the objects fSD = 29%) used in Expt I

Summary

Introduction

We examined how a default assumption about word meaning, the mutual exclusivity assumption and an intentional cue, gaze direction, interacted to guide 24-month-olds' object-word mappings. Serves as a default assumption about word meaning and can be overridden when necessitated by a particular situation, such as when children are faced with the task of learning more than one name for an object (Banigan 8c Mervis, 1988; Waxman & Hatch, 1992; Waxman & Sengbas, 1992), Studies have demonstrated tbat tbe mutual exclusivity assumption is honoured by inf;mts sometime during the second year of life (Evey & Merriman, 1998; Graham, Poulin-Dubois, & Baker, 1998; Halberda, 2003; Liitscbwager& Markman, 1994; Markman, Wasow, & Hansen, 2003; Mervis & Bertrand, 1994) and increases in strength over the preschool years (Merriman & Bowman, 1989) Another line of research bas focused on children's reliance on intentional cues to learn the meanings of words In indirect word learning contexts. In Expt 2, we examined children's reliance on eye-gaze to map a first label to a novel object versus a second label to an already-labelled object

Objectives

Methods

Results

Conclusion