Nonverbal Action Interpretation Guides Novel Word Disambiguation in 12-Month-Olds

Abstract

Whether young infants can exploit sociopragmatic information to interpret new words is a matter of debate. Based on findings and theories from the action interpretation literature, we hypothesized that 12-month-olds should distinguish communicative object-directed actions expressing reference from instrumental object-directed actions indicative of one’s goals, and selectively use the former to identify referents of novel linguistic expressions. This hypothesis was tested across four eye-tracking experiments. Infants watched pairs of unfamiliar objects, one of which was first targeted by either a communicative action (e.g., pointing) or an instrumental action (e.g., grasping) and then labeled with a novel word. As predicted, infants fast-mapped the novel words onto the targeted objects after pointing (Experiments 1 and 4) but not after grasping (Experiment 2) unless the grasping action was preceded by an ostensive signal (Experiment 3). Moreover, whenever infants mapped a novel word onto the object indicated by a communicative action, they tended to map a different novel word onto the distractor object, displaying a mutual exclusivity effect. This reliance on nonverbal action interpretation in the disambiguation of novel words indicates that sociopragmatic inferences about reference likely supplement associative and statistical learning mechanisms from the outset of word learning.

Object labeling and disambiguation in 4‐month‐old infants

“…A novel word could refer to any of the objects present in infants' visual field, parts of the objects, visual features of the objects, or even how they behave. It has been argued that infants only become effective word learners during the second year of life when they are able to constrain this space of alternative hypotheses through the use of word‐learning principles (Bion et al, 2013; Golinkoff et al, 1994; Halberda, 2003), the computation of co‐occurrence regularities between labels and their referents (Smith & Yu, 2008; Yu & Smith, 2011), and/or interpretation of social cues (Barry‐Anwar et al, 2017; Pomiechowska & Csibra, 2022). According to these accounts, younger infants can only associate labels with referents through brute‐force perceptual learning (Pruden et al, 2006), and there is a developmental discontinuity in the way words are learned (Friedrich & Friederici, 2017; Golinkoff et al, 1994; Hollich et al, 2000; Meylan & Bergelson, 2022).…”

Ostensive Marking as a Distinctive Feature of Human Communication

“…There are several developmental studies that illustrate infants' sensitivity to ostensive signals and their disposition to interpret accompanying actions as communicative behavior. In a study by Pomiechowska and Csibra (2022), 12-month-old infants interpreted pointing gestures, but not object grasping, as referring to a subsequently labeled object. However, if the child-directed labeling preceded the grasping action, infants took the target object as the referent of the novel word, as they did in pointing events.…”

Metarepresenting in Communication

“…Let us see how this works. In action demonstrations, after detecting ostension, the infant identifies the object (or object kind) as the referent, by following both the adult's gaze and her manual manipulation of the object (Pomiechowska & Csibra, 2022). A predicate placeholder is generated, filled by conceptual information drawn from the spatiotemporal features of the action (e.g., an action kind or a property), and linked to the referent object.…”