Nonverbal action interpretation guides novel word disambiguation in 12-month-olds

Pomiechowska, Barbara; Csibra, Gergely

doi:10.31234/osf.io/tkhsp

Cited by 6 publications

(7 citation statements)

References 63 publications

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“…For example, when witnessing a Helper voluntarily incurring large costs to bring about a negligible utility increase for the Helpee, one may infer that the Helper greatly values the Helpee. Importantly, however, not all agents' utility functions are the same (Pomiechowska & Csibra, 2020;2022): what is costly for one agent may not be so for another.…”

Section: The Mature Helping Concept: Increasing the Utility Of The He...mentioning

confidence: 99%

The Representation of Third-Party Helping Interactions in Infancy

Schlingloff¹,

Tatone²,

Csibra³

2023

Preprint

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Despite the numerous findings on the sophisticated inferences that human infants draw from observed third-party helping interactions, currently there is no theoretical account of how they come to understand such events in the first place. After reviewing the available evidence in infants, we describe an account of how human adults understand helping actions. According to this mature concept, helping is a second-order goal-directed action aiming to increase the utility of another agent (the helpee) via reducing the cost, or increasing the reward, of the helpee’s own goal-directed action. We then identify the cognitive prerequisites for conceiving helping this way and ask whether these are available to infants in the interpretation of helping interactions. In contrast to the mature concept, we offer two simpler alternatives that may underlie the early understanding of helping actions: (i) helping as enabling, which requires second-order goal attribution but no utility calculus, and (ii) helping as joint action, which requires efficiency (i.e., utility) evaluation without demanding second-order goal attribution. We evaluate the evidence supporting these accounts, derive unique predictions from them, and describe what developmental pathway towards the mature concept they envisage. We conclude the article by outlining further open questions that the developmental literature on the interpretation of helping interactions has not yet addressed.

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Section: The Mature Helping Concept: Increasing the Utility Of The He...mentioning

confidence: 99%

The Representation of Third-Party Helping Interactions in Infancy

Schlingloff¹,

Tatone²,

Csibra³

2023

Preprint

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“…By 12–14 months, infants begin to treat concurrently present words and deictic gestures alike, realizing that both can index hidden objects (Gliga & Csibra, 2009; see also Graham & Kilbreath, 2007). They also use gesture to disambiguate between possible referents of a novel word (Pomiechowska & Csibra, 2020; c.f. Lucca & Wilbourn, 2018).…”

Section: Development Of the Referential Understanding Of Words In Inf...mentioning

confidence: 99%

From social contingency to verbal reference: A constructivist hypothesis.

Luchkina¹,

Xu²

2022

Psychological Review

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In the first year of life, infants' word learning is slow, laborious, and requires repeated exposure to word-referent co-occurrences. In contrast, by 14-18 months, infants learn words from just a few labeling events, use joint attention and eye-gaze to decipher word meaning, and begin to use speech to communicate about absent things. We propose that this remarkable advancement in word learning results from attaining a referential understanding of words -that words are linked to mental representations and used intentionally to communicate about realworld entities. We suggest that verbal reference is supported by co-developing conceptual, social, representational, and statistical learning capacities. We also propose that infants' recognition of this tri-directional link between words, referents, and mental representations is enabled by their experience participating in and observing socially contingent interactions.Understanding verbal reference signals a qualitative shift in infants' word learning. This shift enables infants to bootstrap word meanings from syntax and semantics, learn novel words and facts from non-ostensive communication, and make inferences about speakers' epistemic competence based on their language production. In this paper, we review empirical findings across multiple facets of infant cognition and propose a novel developmental theory of verbal reference. Finally, we suggest new directions of empirical research that may provide stronger and more direct evidence for our theory and contribute to our understanding of the development of verbal reference and language-mediated learning in infancy and beyond.

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“…A third main function of gestures is to disambiguate speech in context. Studies have found that deictic gestures are relied on by children to disambiguate ambiguous scenarios (Grassmann & Tomasello, 2010; Kalagher & Yu, 2006; Pomiechowska & Csibra, 2020, preprint). Grassmann and Tomasello (2010) pit mutual exclusivity and socio‐pragmatic conventions against each other by presenting 2‐ and 4‐year‐olds with a novel and familiar object.…”

Section: The Functions Of Gesture As a Social Cuementioning

confidence: 99%

The dynamic functions of social cues during children's word learning

Lee

Lew‐Williams

2022

Infant and Child Development

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Children learn words in a social environment, facilitated in part by social cues from caregivers, such as eye-gaze and gesture. A common assumption is that social cues convey either perceptual or social information, depending on the age of the child. In this review of research on word learning and social cues during early childhood, we propose that (1) the functions of social cues are not categorically perceptual or social, and (2) social cues support word learning in four interdependent ways: by helping children to orient attention, extract relevant information, disambiguate referents, and understand others' referential intent. We conclude with specific recommendations for theory-building and suggest that the dynamic and complex functions of social cues need to be accounted for in any complete theory of word learning.

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Nonverbal action interpretation guides novel word disambiguation in 12-month-olds

Cited by 6 publications

References 63 publications

The Representation of Third-Party Helping Interactions in Infancy

The Representation of Third-Party Helping Interactions in Infancy

From social contingency to verbal reference: A constructivist hypothesis.

The dynamic functions of social cues during children's word learning

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