Poster #109 - Looking and reaching: the impact of object exploration on novel word learning

• In Event: 3-106 - Poster Session 11
  In Poster Session: PS 11 Section - Language, Communication

Integrative Statement

Much evidence suggests a relationship between motor skills and language development, such that infants who crawl or walk earlier show greater vocabulary sizes. Infants demonstrate increased word learning when the novel label is provided by a caregiver, while the infant is holding the object within a free play task. Prior work has typically been conducted in a semi-naturalistic setting with many other factors influencing the learning process, such as parental scaffolding. While that work demonstrates heightened word learning in an ecologically valid setting, the exact mechanism of change is not clear. The present study aims to examine word learning in conjunction with object exploration in a more controlled laboratory task. Furthermore, prior work suggests that the timing of the label impacts word learning due to the temporal synchrony of hearing the label while seeing and feeling the object. Therefore, the present study uses three conditions varying in degree of object exploration and label timing.

Thirty 18-21 month-old infants came into our laboratory for a one-time session. Infants were seated in a high chair facing an eye-tracker (Tobii x2-60), and after calibration, objects were individually presented to the infants. Three objects were paired with a novel label; each was presented 4 times with auditory stimuli using carrier phrases (novel label repeated 3 times). The other three objects remained unlabeled but were referred to ambiguously. The timing of the object, label, and object manipulation varied according to 3 conditions. Look-Only condition: Objects were presented out of reach, with the auditory stimuli provided during looking time. After looking time, the experimenter created dynamic views of the object while still out of reach. Out-of-Sync condition: Objects were presented out of reach, with the auditory stimuli provided during looking time. Then, the object was moved into the infants’ reaching space, allowing for manual exploration. In-Sync condition: Objects were presented out of reach; however, the auditory stimulus was played only after the object was moved into the infants’ reaching space when the infant could also look and manipulate the object. Presentation trials lasted approximately 14s and were counterbalanced across infants and conditions. The presentation trials were followed by 12 test trials (4 trials per labeled object), in which the labeled object was paired with one of the unlabeled objects.

A label was considered learned if the infant looked towards the target object more during a test window (2000ms) after baseline looking. Data analyses performed on half the sample revealed that for the Look-Only and In-Synch conditions, infants on average looked either equally at the two objects, or looked more to the unlabeled, distractor object. In the Out-of-Sync conditions, the infants looked more towards the target object compared to the distractor, indicating better learning when labels were presented out of reach, followed by object exploration. These preliminary results demonstrate that when parents are not interacting with their child, manipulation of the object appears beneficial for word learning, however presenting the label during object manipulation may not be as effective.

Authors

• Abigail DiMercurio, University of Tennessee
  Presenting Author

• Daniela Corbetta, University of Tennesee, Knoxville
  Non-Presenting Author