Examining the role of attention and intention in two-year-olds' acquisition of novel words

Abstract

Previous studies have demonstrated that infants will use an adult's eye-gaze direction to identify the intended referent of a novel word (e.g., Baldwin, 1991). Here we examine the possibility that eye gaze may be triggering attention to an object because of the directional nature of eye gaze itself. In the first study, we demonstrated that 24-month-olds mapped a novel word to a novel object that had appeared at the location cued by a nonreferential cue (i.e., flashing lights). The results of the second study, however, sug gest that gaze direction cues do not operate in a similar fashion to nonreferential cues. That is, while cueing a specific object with a gaze direction cue led infants to map a novel word to that object, cueing an object location with gaze direction did not result in meaningful word learning. These findings suggest that infants view gaze direction as a marker of intentionality.