Word-object and action-object association learning across early development

Abstract

Successful communication often involves comprehension of both spoken language and observed actions with and without objects. Even very young infants can learn associations between actions and objects as well as between words and objects. However, in daily life, children are usually confronted with both kinds of input simultaneously. Choosing the critical information to attend to in such situations might help children structure the input, and thereby, allow for successful learning. In the current study, we therefore, investigated the developmental time course of children's and adults' word and action learning when given the opportunity to learn both word-object and action-object associations for the same object. All participants went through a learning phase and a test phase. In the learning phase, they were presented with two novel objects which were associated with a distinct novel name (e.g., "Look, a Tanu") and a distinct novel action (e.g., moving up and down while tilting sideways). In the test phase, participants were presented with both objects on screen in a baseline phase, then either heard one of the two labels or saw one of the two actions in a prime phase, and then saw the two objects again on screen in a recognition phase. Throughout the trial, participants' target looking was recorded to investigate whether participants looked at the target object upon hearing its label or seeing its action, and thus, would show learning of the word-object and action-object associations. Growth curve analyses revealed that 12month-olds showed modest learning of action-object associations, 36-month-olds learned word-object associations, and adults learned word-object and action-object associations. These results highlight how children attend to the different information types from the two modalities through which communication is addressed to them. Over time, with increased exposure to systematic word-object mappings, children attend less to action-object mappings, with the latter potentially being mediated by word-object learning even in adulthood. Thus, choosing between different kinds of input that may be more relevant in their rich environment encompassing different modalities might help learning at different points in development.

Do preferences for words and actions influence word-object and action-object learning in early childhood?

“…This would be in keeping with the literature on active learning described above suggesting that children follow their interests in selectively attending to their environment and retain information in keeping with these interests better. In contrast, we expected adults to learn information from both domains independent of any preferences they may have due to their potentially superior abilities to retain and process complex information and their success in a similar task in previous studies (Eiteljoerge et al, 2019b).…”

“…12-month-olds learned action-object but not word-object associations, 24-month-olds learned neither word-object nor action-object associations, 36-month-olds learned word-object associations, and adults learned both word-object and action-object associations (Eiteljoerge et al, 2019b). These results highlight the developmental dynamics of early word and action learning with differences in children's selective attention to different aspects of the signal potentially driving the differences in learning across development.…”

“…We also examined children's pupillary responses to violations of the associations they had been trained on, namely, violation of the actions performed on the different objects and violation of the kind of information presented on the different sides of the screen. We included the former test because 2-and 3-year-olds' inability to recognize trained action-object associations in the previous literature (Eiteljoerge et al, 2019b) could either suggest that children did not form a strong association between the action and the object during the training phase or that children did not retain and store this association strongly enough to access it during test in a task where another recently familiar competitor object was concurrently presented. To tease these two explanations apart, we presented children with trials where they either saw the same action being performed on an object that they had previously been trained on (match trials), or saw the different (but equally familiar) action being performed on this object (mismatch trials).…”

“…For the word learning phase, we used the same material as in Eiteljoerge et al (2019b). It included two novel germs (https://www.giantmicrobes.com/us/, see Fig.…”

“…Until then, what the child learns might be a complex interaction of the child's abilities and interests, and the immediate environment. Indeed, only once the cognitive and perceptual abilities of the child are sufficiently advanced (Eiteljoerge, Adam, Elsner, & Mani, 2019a, 2019b, might the child be able to simultaneously attend and learn from information from multiple modalities. Until then, what the child learns might be a complex interaction of the child's abilities, interests, and the immediate environment.…”