Compared to children, adults are bad at learning language. This is counterintuitive; adults outperform children on most measures of cognition, especially those that involve effort (which continue to mature into early adulthood). The present study asks whether these mature effortful abilities interfere with language learning in adults and further, whether interference occurs equally for aspects of language that adults are good (word-segmentation) versus bad (grammar) at learning. Learners were exposed to an artificial language comprised of statistically defined words that belong to phonologically defined categories (grammar). Exposure occurred under passive or effortful conditions. Passive learners were told to listen while effortful learners were instructed to try to 1) learn the words, 2) learn the categories, or 3) learn the category-order. Effortful learners showed an advantage for learning words while passive learners showed an advantage for learning the categories. Effort can therefore hurt the learning of categories.

The ability to process social information is a critical component of children’s early language and cognitive development. However, as children reach their first birthday, they begin to locomote themselves, dramatically affecting their visual ac- cess to this information. How do these postural and locomotor changes affect children’s access to the social information relevant for word-learning? Here, we explore this question by us- ing head-mounted cameras to record 36 infants’ (8-16 months of age) egocentric visual perspective and use computer vision algorithms to estimate the proportion of faces and hands in infants’ environments. We find that infants’ posture and orientation to their caregiver modulates their access to social information, confirming previous work that suggests motoric developments play a significant role in the emergence of children’s linguistic and social capacities. We suggest that the combined use of head-mounted cameras and the application of new computer vision techniques is a promising avenue for understanding the statistics of infants’ visual and linguistic experience.

How do postural developments affect infants’ access to social information? We recorded egocentric and third‐person video while infants and their caregivers (N = 36, 8‐ to 16‐month‐olds, N = 19 females) participated in naturalistic play sessions. We then validated the use of a neural network pose detection model to detect faces and hands in the infant view. We used this automated method to analyze our data and a prior egocentric video dataset (N = 17, 12‐month‐olds). Infants’ average posture and orientation with respect to their caregiver changed dramatically across this age range; both posture and orientation modulated access to social information. Together, these results confirm that infant’s ability to move and act on the world plays a significant role in shaping the social information in their view.

How do postural developments affect infants’ access to social information? We recorded egocentric and third-person video while infants and their caregivers (N=36, 8–16-month-olds, N=19 females) participated in naturalistic play sessions. We then validated the use of a neural network pose detection model to detect faces and hands in the infant view. We used this automated method to analyze our data and a prior egocentric video dataset (N=17, 12-month-olds). Infants’ average posture and orientation with respect to their caregiver changed dramatically across this age range; both posture and orientation modulated access to social information. Together, these results confirm that infant’s ability to move and act on the world plays a significant role in shaping the social information in their view.