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Infants' Reliance on a Social Criterion for Establishing Word‐Object Relations
Author(s) -
Baldwin Dare A.,
Markman Ellen M.,
Bill Brigitte,
Desjardins Renee N.,
Irwin Jane M.,
Tidball Glynnis
Publication year - 1996
Publication title -
child development
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 3.103
H-Index - 257
eISSN - 1467-8624
pISSN - 0009-3920
DOI - 10.1111/j.1467-8624.1996.tb01906.x
Subject(s) - object (grammar) , psychology , comprehension , word (group theory) , language development , cognitive psychology , communication , developmental psychology , linguistics , social psychology , philosophy
The language children hear presents them with a multitude of co‐occurrences between words and things in the world, and they must repeatedly determine which among these manifold co‐occurrences is relevant. Social factors—such as cues regarding the speaker's referential intent—might serve as one guide to whether word‐object covariation should be registered. In 2 studies, infants (15–20 months and 18–20 months in Studies 1 and 2, respectively) heard novel labels at a time when they were investigating a single novel object; in one case the label was uttered by a speaker seated within the infant's view and displaying concurrent attention to the novel toy (coupled condition), whereas in the other case the label emanated from a speaker seated out of the infant's view (decoupled condition). In both studies, subsequent comprehension questions indicated that infants of 18–20 months registered a stable link between label and object in the coupled condition, but not in the decoupled condition, despite the fact that covariation between label and object was equivalent in the 2 conditions. Thus, by 18–20 months children are inclined to establish a mapping between word and object only when a speaker displays signs of referring to that object.