To hear and to hold: Maternal naming and infant object exploration

Abstract

To acquire language, infants must associate the language they hear with concurrent nonlinguistic experiences - the word-world mapping problem. Caregivers help structure the infant's environment by monitoring infants' attention and producing speech at informative times. In particular, children's learning of object names depends on their sensory experiences at times when objects are named. At 18 months, children's learning of novel words is predicted by the size of the object in their visual field when it is named [1]. However, there is not a direct relationship between infant's attention to objects in the world and speech produced by caregivers. Infant's multimodal experiences unfold in interactions with caregivers where both partners' behavior, including vocalizations, gaze, and manual activity, dynamically structure the visual and auditory scene [2,3].