Language Acquisition Research Papers - Academia.edu (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... more

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...