[PS-1.25] The effect of statistical frequency of multiple cues during infant cross-situational learning of word-referent mappings

Dunn, K. 1 , Frost, R. 2 & Monaghan, P. 3

1 Lancaster University
2 Max Plank Institue for Psycholinguists
3 Lancaster University, University of Amsterdam

Previous research has shown that infants as young as 14-months of age can make word-object mappings through cross-situational statistics (Smith & Yu, 2008). We explored the effect of frequency of additional environmental cues on infant?s ability to learn novel labels by adding distributional (marker words), prosodic (infant-directed speech) and gesture (head turn) cues. English monolingual 14-month-old infants (N = 32) were randomly assigned to one of two conditions; 100% cue frequency or 67% cue frequency. Our results indicate that, in the training trials, infants in the 67% condition spent more time looking to the gesture cue than either of the two objects. Infants in the 100% condition spent less time looking to the gesture cue and more time looking to the objects than those in the 67% condition. In the test trials, those in the 67% condition spent more time looking to the distractor object than those in the 100% condition. These results suggest that, at 14 months of age, infants are better able to map novel labels to novel objects when multiple cues are consistently given than when cues are statistically less frequent.