Understanding Interest in the Second Year of Life

MacPherson, A; Moore, Chris

doi:10.1111/j.1532-7078.2009.00011.x

Cited by 4 publications

(8 citation statements)

References 8 publications

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“…This suggests, then, that children in Experiment 1 had to overcome their a priori preferences for the familiarized novel objects to choose the supernovel objects. This is consistent with previous research that suggests that by 18–20 months children are able to overcome their own egocentric preferences to respond to adult requests (MacPherson & Moore, 2010; Repacholi & Gopnik, 1997). In this light, children’s strong bias for the supernovel object is even more striking.…”

Section: Resultssupporting

confidence: 93%

“…The extant word learning literature is filled with examples in which young children use pragmatic cues in various ambiguous situations. For example, children make pragmatic inferences after having played with a particular object or game (e.g., Akhtar, et al, 1996; Liebal, Behne, Carpenter, & Tomasello, 2009; MacPherson & Moore, 2010) and after observing another’s preference for a particular item (e.g., Repacholi & Gopnik, 1997; Saylor, Sabbagh, Foruna, & Troseth, 2009) as well as when faced with gestures and other similar cues (e.g., Baldwin, 1991; Moore, et al, 1999; Tomasello & Akhtar, 1995) Clearly, in several situations, pragmatic cues can provided valuable information to solve the mapping problem.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Children can also use relative novelty in a context to determine if a word denotes an object or action (Tomasello & Akhtar, 1995). In highly ambiguous cases, in which an adult does not use a name but requests “it,” 12–14-month-old infants will choose the object they have never played with before, that is, the object that is most novel to themselves, but by 18–20 months infants are just as likely to choose the object that is most novel to the adult (MacPherson & Moore, 2010). Similarly, after an adult and infant have played with an object together, 14–20-month-old infants will map the ambiguous pronoun “it” to something previously played with, rather than something novel (Ganea & Saylor, 2007).…”

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confidence: 99%

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What’s new? Children prefer novelty in referent selection

et al. 2011

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Determining the referent of a novel name is a critical task for young language learners. The majority of studies on children’s referent selection focus on manipulating the sources of information (linguistic, contextual and pragmatic) that children can use to solve the referent mapping problem. Here, we take a step back and explore how children’s endogenous biases towards novelty and their own familiarity with novel objects influence their performance in such a task. We familiarized 2-year-old children with previously novel objects. Then, on novel name referent selection trials children were asked to select the referent from three novel objects: two previously seen and one completely novel object. Children demonstrated a clear bias to select the most novel object. A second experiment controls for pragmatic responding and replicates this finding. We conclude, therefore, that children’s referent selection is biased by previous exposure and children’s endogenous bias to novelty.

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Section: Resultssupporting

confidence: 93%

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

mentioning

confidence: 99%

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What’s new? Children prefer novelty in referent selection

et al. 2011

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“…MacPherson and Moore (2010) directly contrasted what an adult knew with what the infant herself was familiar with. In their study, two objects were mutually familiar for adult and infant, a third object was new for the infant and a fourth was new for the adult, but “old” for the infant.…”

Section: The Role Of the Experiential Backgroundmentioning

confidence: 99%

The primacy of social over visual perspective-taking

Moll¹,

Kadipasaoglu²

2013

Front. Hum. Neurosci.

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In this article, we argue for the developmental primacy of social over visual perspective-taking. In our terminology, social perspective-taking involves some understanding of another person's preferences, goals, intentions etc. which can be discerned from temporally extended interactions, including dialog. As is evidenced by their successful performance on various reference disambiguation tasks, infants in their second year of life first begin to develop such skills. They can, for example, determine which of two or more objects another is referring to based on previously expressed preferences or the distinct quality with which these objects were jointly explored. The pattern of findings from developmental research further indicates that this ability emerges sooner than analogous forms of visual perspective-taking. Our explanatory account of this developmental sequence highlights the primary importance of joint attention and the formation of common ground with others. Before children can develop an awareness of what exactly is seen or how an object appears from a particular viewpoint, they must learn to share attention and build common “experiential” ground. Learning about others' as well as one's own “snapshot” perspectives in a literal, i.e., optical sense of the term, is a secondary step that affords an abstraction from all (prior) pragmatic involvement with objects.

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“…showing that people attend more to novel stimuli in learning (e.g., Snyder et al, 2008;MacPherson & Moore, 2010;Horst et al, 2011), we use the general idea of Nematzadeh et al (2012) in allocating more strength to alignments that are more novel (cf. Eqn.…”

Section: Modeling Attention To Novelty Building On Researchmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Interaction of Memory and Attention in Novel Word Generalization: A Computational Investigation

Grant,

Nematzadeh,

Stevenson

2016

Preprint

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People exhibit a tendency to generalize a novel noun to the basic-level in a hierarchical taxonomy -a cognitively salient category such as "dog" -with the degree of generalization depending on the number and type of exemplars. Recently, a change in the presentation timing of exemplars has also been shown to have an effect, surprisingly reversing the prior observed pattern of basic-level generalization. We explore the precise mechanisms that could lead to such behavior by extending a computational model of word learning and word generalization to integrate cognitive processes of memory and attention. Our results show that the interaction of forgetting and attention to novelty, as well as sensitivity to both type and token frequencies of exemplars, enables the model to replicate the empirical results from different presentation timings. Our results reinforce the need to incorporate general cognitive processes within word learning models to better understand the range of observed behaviors in vocabulary acquisition.

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Understanding Interest in the Second Year of Life

Cited by 4 publications

References 8 publications

What’s new? Children prefer novelty in referent selection

What’s new? Children prefer novelty in referent selection

The primacy of social over visual perspective-taking

The Interaction of Memory and Attention in Novel Word Generalization: A Computational Investigation

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