Perceiving referential intent: Dynamics of reference in natural parent–child interactions

Abstract

Two studies are presented which examined the temporal dynamics of the social-attentive behaviors that co-occur with referent identification during natural parent-child interactions in the home. Study 1 focused on 6.2 hours of videos of 56 parents interacting during everyday activities with their 14–18 month-olds, during which parents uttered common nouns as parts of spontaneously occurring utterances. Trained coders recorded, on a second-by-second basis, parent and child attentional behaviors relevant to reference in the period (40 sec.) immediately surrounding parental naming. The referential transparency of each interaction was independently assessed by having naïve adult participants guess what word the parent had uttered in these video segments, but with the audio turned off, forcing them to use only non-linguistic evidence available in the ongoing stream of events. We found a great deal of ambiguity in the input along with a few potent moments of word-referent transparency; these transparent moments have a particular temporal signature with respect to parent and child attentive behavior: it was the object’s appearance and/or the fact that it captured parent/child attention at the moment the word was uttered, not the presence of the object throughout the video, that predicted observers’ accuracy. Study 2 experimentally investigated the precision of the timing relation, and whether it has an effect on observer accuracy, by disrupting the timing between when the word was uttered and the behaviors present in the videos as they were originally recorded. Disrupting timing by only +/− 1 to 2 sec. reduced participant confidence and significantly decreased their accuracy in word identification. The results enhance an expanding literature on how dyadic attentional factors can influence early vocabulary growth. By hypothesis, this kind of time-sensitive data-selection process operates as a filter on input, removing many extraneous and ill-supported word-meaning hypotheses from consideration during children’s early vocabulary learning.

Proceedings of the 7th Workshop on Cognitive Aspects of Computational Language Learning

“…Finally, we have demonstrated the importance of synchrony by showing that displacing the verbal mention in time degrades prediction accuracy, particularly when the offset is negative. This is consistent with the findings of Trueswell et al (2016, Figure 2, and compare our Figure 2) who instead of a statistical classifier working off the annotation used human observers of the video.…”

“…Previous research has highlighted the time-synchronicity of non-verbal cues with verbal utterances (Matatyaho and Gogate, 2008;). Furthermore, there has been work in the HSP paradigm on determining the effects to referential transparency by displacing these cues (Trueswell et al, 2016). Using our fine-grained representation of time, we wanted to investigate the effects in our model to see if would arrive at similar effects as Trueswell et al…”

“…Meaning seems to arise as a probabilistic process where recurrent acoustic patterns gain referential value as they are linked to time-synchronous recurrent patterns in other modalities (Trueswell et al, 2016;Gogate et al, 2006;Matatyaho and Gogate, 2008;). The details of this process, such as the informativeness and temporal dynamics of different cues in word-referent mapping, are still contested, though.…”

The Signal in the Noise: The Visual Ecology of Parents' Object Naming

“…Through a series of studies employing mini head cameras worn by toddlers, they demonstrated that when parent object naming is viewed from the toddler learner's perspective, many times the referent of parents' object naming is hardly ambiguous, suggesting that the starting assumptions for many of our accounts of word learning may be inaccurate. Although the free‐flowing play observed in these recent head camera studies mimicked toddlers' everyday play, it took place in an unnatural laboratory context, raising legitimate concerns about whether the conclusions would generalize to messier real‐life environments (e.g., de Barbaro, Johnson, Forster, & Deak, ; Trueswell et al., ). The current study tests the generalizability of these laboratory‐based findings by examining the nature of toddlers' views of objects during play in their homes and by investigating the processes that undergird those views.…”

“…All of these studies took place in a stripped‐down setting: Parents and their toddlers played with a few laboratory‐constructed objects while sitting across from one another at a table in a bare laboratory room (see Figure b). Intuitively, everyday learning takes place in a context very different from this contrived setting (Medina, Snedeker, Trueswell, & Gleitman, ; Trueswell et al., ). Previous studies that have explicitly compared parent–infant interactions in the home to those in the laboratory do indeed show key differences (Belsky, ; Stevenson, Leavitt, Roach, Chapman, & Miller, ).…”