Flexible fast‐mapping: Deaf children dynamically allocate visual attention to learn novel words in American Sign Language

Abstract

Word learning in young children requires coordinated attention between language input and the referent object. Current accounts of word learning are based on spoken language, where the association between language and objects occurs through simultaneous and multimodal perception. In contrast, deaf children acquiring American Sign Language (ASL) perceive both linguistic and non‐linguistic information through the visual mode. In order to coordinate attention to language input and its referents, deaf children must allocate visual attention optimally between objects and signs. We conducted two eye‐tracking experiments to investigate how young deaf children allocate attention and process referential cues in order to fast‐map novel signs to novel objects. Participants were deaf children learning ASL between the ages of 17 and 71 months. In Experiment 1, participants (n = 30) were presented with a novel object and a novel sign, along with a referential cue that occurred either before or after the sign label. In Experiment 2, a new group of participants (n = 32) were presented with two novel objects and a novel sign, so that the referential cue was critical for identifying the target object. Across both experiments, participants showed evidence for fast‐mapping the signs regardless of the timing of the referential cue. Individual differences in children's allocation of attention during exposure were correlated with their ability to fast‐map the novel signs at test. This study provides first evidence for fast‐mapping in sign language, and contributes to theoretical accounts of how word learning develops when all input occurs in the visual modality.

I See What You Are Saying: Hearing Infants’ Visual Attention and Social Engagement in Response to Spoken and Sign Language

“…Our findings with sign-naïve infants contribute to recent research testing sign-exposed children in language learning tasks ( MacDonald et al, 2020 ; Lieberman et al, 2021 ). The distinct attentional responses to language in different modalities, observed here in early infancy, must be independent of language exposure, but may still lay a foundation for the later strategies that emerge specifically for sign-exposed children.…”

“…In designing our measures, we took advantage of compelling evidence that young children who are exposed to sign language do indeed divide their visual attention strategically and fluidly between a signer and a referent object during word-learning episodes. For instance, sign-exposed toddlers assess the structure of linguistic input to advantageously allocate their visual attention between a signer and a referent when fast-mapping novel signs ( Lieberman et al, 2021 ) or when finding a known referent ( MacDonald et al, 2020 ). They also produce frequent gaze shifts between visual referents and communicative partners during interaction, and do so in ways that differ from their speech-exposed peers ( Lieberman et al, 2014 ).…”

Do parents modify child-directed signing to emphasize iconicity?

“…The ASL Parent input and Language Acquisition in Young children (ASL-PLAY) dataset is a corpus of naturalistic interactions between parents and their deaf children ( Lieberman et al, 2021 ; Lieberman, 2022 ). Parents and children were recorded while engaged in a free play interaction.…”

Social Brain Perspectives on the Social and Evolutionary Neuroscience of Human Language

“…Finally, though admittedly constituting a much smaller body of literature, at least some recent studies have noted similar effects for deaf children learning American Sign Language (ASL) [93][94][95]. For instance, at least one relevant study has noted that gaze patterns used by sign language dyads in deaf children appear to promote joint attention social behaviors, which are known from previous research to be integral for further facilitating emerging language skills [96].…”