An Embodied Perspective of Early Language Exposure

An Embodied Perspective of Early Language Exposure Hanako Yoshida (yoshida@uh.edu) Joseph M. Burling (jmburling@uh.edu) Department of Psychology, University of Houston, 126 Heyne Building Houston, TX 77204-5022 USA Abstract Advances in developmental research has made it clear that word learning has a long beginning. Recent work has demonstrated that infants learn words at 6 months of age—that is, before the traditional “first word” mile- stone in productive language—which is a full year before the usual “naming explosion” in productive vocabulary. Before infants talk, walk, or even point, how can the earliest stage of word learning take place at all? We used recent technology that allowed us to zoom in on the point of view of infants and also the traditional room- view observations to document how infants’ visual input is dynamically synchronized with their own participation, as well as from social input in the context of parent-child word learning play. The parents’ task was to play with the child with a set of toys as they taught the toys to them. To specifically document the child’s dominant view and their participation, we coded the size of the toy object on which the child was focused and who was manipulating the toy at the moment. The results reveal systematic and dynamic links between infants’ view and their level of participation. Keywords: embodied perception; word learning context; child-centered view Introduction Recent advances have made it clear that word learning has an early beginning. A new study has demonstrated that infants comprehend at least some words at 6 months of age—that is, before the traditional “first word” milestone in productive language (Bergelson & Swingley, 2012)— and a full year before the usual “naming explosion” in pro- ductive vocabulary (Goldfield & Reznick, 1990). What is the nature of this very early stage of word learning? What are the experiences when such infants hear words, and are they fundamentally different from the experiences of older infants? During the first 2 years of life, infants learn and refine a whole set of new motor skills that dra- matically change the ways in which the body moves and interacts with the environment, and their social interac- tions consequently also change. Six-month-old infants are relative novices at reaching for objects and do not sit steadily, and so for the most part, objects are brought to them or perceived from a distance; 12-month-olds, in contrast, walk and bring themselves to objects, and 18- month-olds are mobile, socially skilled, and capable of physically achieving their own desires. Do these changes in the ways infants physically interact in the world also change the way they socially interact, and determine the nature of their visual experiences that support word learning? Needless to say, there are a number of factors that con- tribute to the process of later word learning, including social cues such as eye gaze and gesture, prosody, lan- guage structure, input frequency, pragmatics, and many others. Yet recent evidence demonstrating effective word learning at a much earlier stage than previously thought suggests the need for investigation of the language learn- ing environment at the earliest stage. Moreover, learners, even very young babies, actively engage in the world by contingently responding to the social gestures of others. In doing so, infants—and perhaps in different ways at different ages—distort regularities and carve up the input in systematic ways. This means that one cannot really consider the input separately from the learners’ own ac- tions, because the learner selects and creates the input. Importantly, word learning takes place at any stage of early parent-child interactions, and most often co-occurs with infants’ active exploration of objects where their head, hands, or body, and eyes coordinate and shape “in- put” and possibly optimize their view for initial learning of labels. Recent work that motivated this present study inves- tigated how early learners create their own visual in- put by observing the first-person-view during toy play (Smith, Yu, & Pereira, 2011; Yoshida & Smith, 2008; Yu, Smith, Shen, Pereira, & Smith, 2009). These studies typically used a small camera attached to young chil- dren’s foreheads and documented how this child-centered view provides insight into factors relevant for early word learning. In the work presented here, we sought to study developmental changes in this child-centered view by lon- gitudinally following children from 6 to 18 months in order to detail the quality of their visual input, how it changes over time, and the potential dynamic relation to their rapidly growing physical capacities in the context of parent-child play. Documentation of precise changes in visual experiences mediated through children’s own phys- ical growth is essential to studying how infants’ changing motor skills serve as strong filters of their early learning experiences, because effective visual attention determines effective learning. Emergence of Language Learning One crucial question in language learning is how children overcome referential ambiguity—that is, how children se- lectively extract the referents to map the corresponding words. Effective learning of such a complex skill requires a highly selective process of sampling information from the environment; observing infants’ eye gaze reveals a great deal about what they are processing and learn-