Semantic priming promotes infants’ success in naming things unseen

• In Event: Poster Session 12
  In Poster Session: PS 12 Topic - Language, Communication

Abstract

A fundamental feature of human language is that it permits us to call to mind objects, events, and ideas that we cannot witness directly. This communicative power rests upon the referential status of words—an appreciation that words are linked to mental representations, ones that we can retrieve and modify (Waxman & Gelman, 2009). Although attaining an appreciation of this referential status represents a pivotal developmental milestone, its origins remain unclear. To address this gap, we asked whether infants can establish a representation for the meaning of a novel word based on language alone and later draw on that representation to identify a referent of that word.
Fifteen-month-olds watched an actor who first named three familiar, visible objects and then looked toward and labeled a fourth object that is hidden from view. To help infants make inferences about the meaning of the novel word, in the Semantic Priming condition (Figure 1), we presented them with three trials, in which the actor labeled familiar objects that were all members of the same semantic neighborhood (e.g., apple, banana, orange). On trial 4, the actor introduced a novel label for an object that was placed behind her and seemingly unintentionally occluded by her body, “Oh, look! A modi! That’s a nice modi. I like modis”. The No Priming condition (Figure 1) was identical to the Semantic Priming condition, except that familiar objects were semantically distant from each other (e.g., hat, shoe, car).
For the familiar nouns, we selected objects whose names are understood by at least 60% of 15-month-olds (apple, banana, orange, jacket, sock, hat, truck, car, bus, cat, dog, horse). For the novel nouns, we selected objects whose names infants would not know (e.g., rare tropical fruits, exotic animals). In addition to leveraging infants’ conceptual knowledge, we also presented them with rich communicative cues (e.g., looking and pointing to objects). These cues were intended to ensure that infants interpret the trial in which the object is hidden as a labeling episode as well.
We predicted that in the Semantic Priming, but not in the No Priming condition, the presentation of familiar word-object pairs will enable infants to constrain the range of possible referents of the novel word to items belonging to the same category as the demonstrated objects. Data collection for both conditions is still ongoing (currently, on Lookit), but the results of the pilot data analyses (N=18) in the Semantic Priming condition reveal a significant looking preference for the target. Infants’ LT to the target image across 6 s was significantly above chance (50%), M=64%, SD=8%, t(17)=5.5, p<.001. The time course data reflects infants’ reactions to verbal prompts: infants’ looking to the target increased after each mention of the target word (Figure 2).
These data suggest that 15-month-olds do have the ability to learn novel word meanings from language input alone and provides hints that infants might indeed be using semantic priming to infer such meanings. Implications for the development of linguistic reference and its underlying mechanisms will be discussed.

Authors

• Elena Luchkina, Northwestern University
  Presenting Author

• Sandra R Waxman, Northwestern University
  Non-Presenting Author