Taking the infant's perspective to study word learning allowed us to find new evidence that suggests a causal pathway through which infants’ bodies shape their learning input.
Infants’ multimodal attention to objects around labeling utterances was the strongest predictor of real‐time learning. Neither frequency of object labeling nor infant visual attention during and around labeling utterances predicted whether infants learned the object‐label mappings. Wireless head‐mounted eye tracking was used to record gaze data from infants and parents during free‐flowing play with unfamiliar objects in a home‐like lab environment. Our results implicate a causal pathway through which infants’ bodily actions play a critical role in early word learning. Instead, coordinated, multimodal attention – when infants’ hands and eyes were attending to the same object – predicted word learning. More specifically, we found that infant visual attention alone did not predict word learning. We found that how often parents named objects during play did not predict learning, but instead, it was infants’ attention during and around a labeling utterance that predicted whether an object‐label mapping was learned. After the play session, infants were tested on their knowledge of object‐label mappings. Parents and 12‐to‐26‐month‐old infants wore wireless head‐mounted eye trackers, allowing them to move freely around a home‐like lab environment.
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To study the real‐time behaviors required for learning new words during free‐flowing toy play, we measured infants’ visual attention and manual actions on to‐be‐learned toys. Most research on early language learning focuses on the objects that infants see and the words they hear in their daily lives, although growing evidence suggests that motor development is also closely tied to language development. Mothers' decreasing use of synchrony across age parallels infants' decreasing reliance on synchrony, suggesting a dynamical and reciprocal environment–organismic relation. Mothers of prelexical infants used target words in synchrony with object motion more often than mothers of early- and advanced-lexical infants. Further, mothers tailored their communication to infants' level of lexical-mapping development. Thus, ‘multimodal motherese’ likely highlights target word-referent relations for infants.
The results indicated that mothers used target words more often than nontarget words in synchrony with object motion and sometimes touch. Thus, mothers' target and nontarget naming were coded for synchrony and other communication styles. Recent research suggests that young infants rely on temporal synchrony to learn syllable–object relations, but later, the role of synchrony diminishes. Mothers taught their infants four target (novel) words by using distinct objects during a semistructured play episode. The infants were from three age groups representing three levels of lexical-mapping development: prelexical (5 to 8 months), early-lexical (9 to 17 months), and advanced-lexical (21 to 30 months). This study examined European American and Hispanic American mothers' multimodal communication to their infants (N= 24).