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Word learning through eye gaze cues at 12 to 24 months
Poster A108 in Poster Session A, Tuesday, October 24, 10:15 am - 12:00 pm CEST, Espace Vieux-Port
Osnat Segal1, Zipora Yegudaye; 1Tel-Aviv University
Background: Most studies assessed word learning through eye gaze in infants by competing visually salient and non-salient objects . Only by 19 months, infants used the speaker's eye gaze to learn the name of a visually non-salient object, overriding the attraction of the interesting object. These studies left, however, a few questions unresolved. One question is how infants learn a new word when both objects have similar saliency and therefore word learning is mainly guided by social cues as well as by visual and auditory memory of the labeled object . Also, in the learning phase of previous studies the speaker addressed verbally one object . Thus, it is not clear whether the infant learned to associate the specific label (e.g., bicket) with the object or whether the fact that the speaker looked and addressed the object verbally made it more noticeable for the infant and consequently facilitated its recognition during the test phase. Moreover, previous studies, presented only two objects in the test condition providing a high chance (50%) for guessing. Purpose: The aim of the present study was to assess word learning through eye gaze cues by using a novel paradigm that took into consideration the difficulties of previous procedures. Method: Forty-five typically developing Hebrew-speaking infants 12, 18 and 24 month old, were assessed on their ability to learn a new word (bícket or domát). The procedure included 4 parts presented in a video movie: a) recognition of a familiar word among two presented objects (where is the ball?), b) listening to a speaker (woman) looking and talking towards an unfamiliar object (noisemaker) without labeling it in six concessive phrases (e.g, look, it is here), c) learning phase in which two unfamiliar animal dolls with similar visual saliency were presented, and the speaker looked and labeled one of the dolls in six concessive phrases, and d) testing phase in which the four objects appeared on the screen and the infant had to recognize the target word. Infants were expected to increase their looking time to the target word compared to the distractors after hearing its auditory label during a time window of 1600 ms. Looking behavior was measured with an automatic corneal-reflection eye tracker SMI RED mounted on an LCD monitor. Results and conclusions: (a) 24-month-olds followed the eye gaze of the interlocutor towards the target object more times and showed increased looking time to the target object in the learning phase compared to 12 and 18-month-old infants, (b) a correlation was found between looking time to the target object in the learning phase and test phase, (c) infants across all age groups showed increased looking time to the target object compared to the three other distractors in the test phase; however, 24-month-old infants had longer looking time compared to the other age groups. The results suggest that the ability to follow the eye gaze of the speaker and orient at the target object increases with age, and is related to word learning.
Topic Areas: Language Development/Acquisition,