From social contingency to verbal reference: A constructivist hypothesis.

Abstract

In the first year of life, infants' word learning is slow, laborious, and requires repeated exposure to word-referent co-occurrences. In contrast, by 14-18 months, infants learn words from just a few labeling events, use joint attention and eye-gaze to decipher word meaning, and begin to use speech to communicate about absent things. We propose that this remarkable advancement in word learning results from attaining a referential understanding of words -that words are linked to mental representations and used intentionally to communicate about realworld entities. We suggest that verbal reference is supported by co-developing conceptual, social, representational, and statistical learning capacities. We also propose that infants' recognition of this tri-directional link between words, referents, and mental representations is enabled by their experience participating in and observing socially contingent interactions.Understanding verbal reference signals a qualitative shift in infants' word learning. This shift enables infants to bootstrap word meanings from syntax and semantics, learn novel words and facts from non-ostensive communication, and make inferences about speakers' epistemic competence based on their language production. In this paper, we review empirical findings across multiple facets of infant cognition and propose a novel developmental theory of verbal reference. Finally, we suggest new directions of empirical research that may provide stronger and more direct evidence for our theory and contribute to our understanding of the development of verbal reference and language-mediated learning in infancy and beyond.

How does social contingency facilitate vocabulary development?

“…Indeed, by 12-14 months, infants exhibit unambiguous signs of understanding that language can communicate -they begin to comprehend utterances about objects or phenomena that they cannot see (Osina et al, 2013(Osina et al, , 2014Saylor & Baldwin, 2004;Vouloumanos et al, 2012). As a potential consequence of these advances, infant's word knowledge (e.g., Bergelson, 2020) and word learning capacity (e.g., Woodward et al, 1994) begin to expand at an accelerating rate at around the same age (see Luchkina & Xu, 2022, for a more detailed review). Although the present investigation does not directly test the possibility that experience with socially contingent interactions helps infants understand the communicative nature of words, our results are consistent with it.…”

“…By accumulating experience with parents' reactions to their own vocalizations, infants may realize that vocalizations influence their social environment, and this realization may in turn help them infer the communicative nature of speech. Such an inference enables a wide range of language advances, including enhanced speech processing, increased attention to language, and more rapid word-referent mapping (see Luchkina & Xu, 2022;Masek et al, 2021, for reviews), all of which will facilitate vocabulary growth.…”

“…and non-verbal (actions towards the object or towards the infant, claps, gestures, etc.). Non-verbal behaviors were analyzed because they may also provide critical insights about the communicative properties of language (e.g., Luchkina & Xu, 2022;Tauzin & Gergely, 2019. Verbal and non-verbal responses were treated as independent predictors, even if they co-occurred (24% of all non-verbal responses cooccurred with verbal responses).…”

The Role of Talking Faces in Infant Language Learning: Mind the Gap between Screen-Based Settings and Real-Life Communicative Interactions

“…This is thought to be key for them to progressively understand that specific behaviors (words, gestures, etc.) are referential (i.e., they are caused by specific mental representations possessed by senders), which can then support a progressive internalization of their meanings [113,114,123].…”

“…Studies examining real-life interactions between infants and their parents (e.g., during joint play) have shown large inter-individual variability in the extent to which caregivers tend to contingently respond to their infants’ behaviors (a measure referred to as contingency, sensitivity, or responsiveness), and this seems to be a unique and important predictor for infant word learning [ 112 , 113 , 114 ]. For instance, the more caregivers show temporally contingent responsivity to their infant’s behavior, the more their infant is attentive [ 115 , 116 , 117 ], learns novel rules [ 118 ], novel words [ 112 , 113 , 114 , 119 ], remains sensitive to non-native phonetic contrasts [ 120 , 121 , 122 ], and produces more mature speech-like vocalizations [ 111 ]. The importance of social contingency for learning has been suggested to stem from the fact that it allows infants to better predict the consequences of their actions and, as such, to better connect causes and consequences during social interactions.…”