Speech Intonation Induces Enhanced Face Perception in Infants

Sirri, Louah; Linnert, Szilvia; Reid, Vincent M.; Parise, Eugenio

doi:10.1038/s41598-020-60074-7

Cited by 7 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 48 publications

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“…We operationalized this idea by modifying the order of events in our task: we presented the speech stimuli before the execution of the grasping action (and not after, as in Experiment 2). Infant-directed speech is an ostensive signal itself (Csibra, 2010;Sirri et al, 2020;Zangl & Mills, 2007) and could lead infants to expect subsequent actions to be communicative (Okumura et al, 2013a;Senju & OPEN MIND: Discoveries in Cognitive Science . Although the change of order between speech and action seems subtle, we predicted that it should be sufficient to influence the infants' take on the grasping action, because the initial ostensive signal could facilitate a communicative, and inhibit an instrumental, interpretation of the subsequent action (see also Baker et al, 2009).…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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

Pomiechowska

Csibra

2022

Open Mind

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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.

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Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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

Pomiechowska

Csibra

2022

Open Mind

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“…Here, we presented the speech stimuli before the execution of the grasping action (and not after, as in Experiment 2). Infantdirected speech intonation is an ostensive signal itself (Csibra, 2010;Sirri et al, 2020;Zangl & Mills, 2007) and could lead infants to expect subsequent actions to be communicative (Senju & Csibra, 2008;Okumura et al, 2013a). Although the change of order between speech and action seems subtle, we predicted that it should be sufficient to influence the infants' take on the grasping action, because the initial ostensive signal could facilitate a communicative, and inhibit an instrumental, interpretation of the subsequent action (see also, Baker et al, 2009).…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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

Pomiechowska¹,

Csibra²

2020

Preprint

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Whether young infants can exploit socio-pragmatic 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 socio-pragmatic inferences about reference likely supplement associative and statistical learning mechanisms from the outset of word learning.

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“…Infants may exploit the prosodic layer of IDS for communicative intentions to gain access to its contents (i.e., informative intentions). IDS modulates electrophysiological responses to faces in 4-month-olds, perhaps because it generates communicative expectations (Sirri et al, 2020). It is interpreted as an ostensive cue by 5-6-month-olds, just as eye-gaze (Senju and Csibra, 2008;Parise and Csibra, 2013;Lloyd-Fox et al, 2015).…”

Section: Communicative Self-referentiality In the Speech Signalmentioning

confidence: 99%

Meaning as mentalization

Forgács

2024

Front. Hum. Neurosci.

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The way we establish meaning has been a profound question not only in language research but in developmental science as well. The relation between linguistic form and content has been loosened up in recent pragmatic approaches to communication, showing that code-based models of language comprehension must be augmented by context-sensitive, pragmatic-inferential mechanisms to recover the speaker’s intended meaning. Language acquisition has traditionally been thought to involve building a mental lexicon and extracting syntactic rules from noisy linguistic input, while communicative-pragmatic inferences have also been argued to be indispensable. Recent research findings exploring the electrophysiological indicator of semantic processing, the N400, have raised serious questions about the traditional separation between semantic decoding and pragmatic inferential processes. The N400 appears to be sensitive to mentalization—the ability to attribute beliefs to social partners—already from its developmental onset. This finding raises the possibility that mentalization may not simply contribute to pragmatic inferences that enrich linguistic decoding processes but that the semantic system may be functioning in a fundamentally mentalistic manner. The present review first summarizes the key contributions of pragmatic models of communication to language comprehension. Then, it provides an overview of how communicative intentions are interpreted in developmental theories of communication, with a special emphasis on mentalization. Next, it discusses the sensitivity of infants to the information-transmitting potential of language, their ability to pick up its code-like features, and their capacity to track language comprehension of social partners using mentalization. In conclusion, I argue that the recovery of meaning during linguistic communication is not adequately modeled as a process of code-based semantic retrieval complemented by pragmatic inferences. Instead, the semantic system may establish meaning, as intended, during language comprehension and acquisition through mentalistic attribution of content to communicative partners.

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Speech Intonation Induces Enhanced Face Perception in Infants

Cited by 7 publications

References 48 publications

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

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

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

Meaning as mentalization

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