Word-object and action-object learning in a unimodal context during early childhood

Abstract

Word-object and action-object learning in children aged 30 to 48 months appears to develop at a similar time scale and adheres to similar attentional constraints. However, children below 36 months show different patterns of learning word-object and action-object associations when this information is presented in a bimodal context (Eiteljoerge et al., 2019b). Here, we investigated 12- and 24-month-olds’ word-object and action-object learning when this information is presented in a unimodal context. Forty 12- and 24-month-olds were presented with two novel objects that were either first associated with a novel label (word learning task) and then later with a novel action (action learning task) or vice versa. In subsequent yoked test phases, children either heard one of the novel labels or saw a hand performing one of the actions presented with the two objects on screen while we measured their target looking. Generalized linear mixed models indicate that 12-month-olds learned action-object associations but not word-object associations and 24-month-olds learned neither word- nor action-object associations. These results extend previous findings (Eiteljoerge et al., 2019b) and, together, suggest that children appear to learn action-object associations early in development while struggling with learning word-object associations in certain contexts until 2 years of age.

Better in sync: Temporal dynamics explain multisensory word‐action‐object learning in early development

“…In contrast, college-aged adults show learning of wordobject and action-object associations (Eiteljoerge et al, 2019). In a follow-up study, Eiteljoerge et al (2024) presented 1-and 2-year-olds with the same stimuli but in temporally separated blocks, and children showed the same results as in the previous study. Such findings are also consistent with research showing that young children attend to input from a single preferred modality when presented with information from two modalities (e.g., Lewkowicz, 1994;Robinson & Sloutsky, 2004;Sloutsky & Napolitano, 2003).…”