Effects of Bilingualism on Children ’ s Use of Social Cues in Word Learning (original) (raw)

Research has demonstrated that children are attentive to social cues like eye gaze and pointing gestures and use these cues to rapidly build word-referent mappings from the early stages of language development (e.g., Baldwin, 1993; Brooks & Meltzoff, 2002; Diesendruck & Markson, 2001). Six-month-olds, for example, would follow the direction of an adult’s gaze to an object in the presence of complementary signals such as eye contact and infant-directed speech (Senju & Csibra, 2008). By the end of the first year, infants begin to understand human gaze and pointing as social and goal-directed actions (Beier & Spelke, 2012; Senju, Csibra, & Johnson, 2008; Woodward, 2003), while older toddlers and preschoolers are able to use social cues to identify referential mappings in social learning contexts, demonstrating a better understanding of the communicative intention of these social cues (Behne, Carpenter, & Tomasello, 2005; Berman, Chambers, & Graham, 2010; Jaswal, 2004). Children also re...