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Related Experiment Video

Updated: Jun 26, 2026

Experience is Instrumental in Tuning a Link Between Language and Cognition: Evidence from 6- to 7- Month-Old Infants' Object Categorization

Experience is Instrumental in Tuning a Link Between Language and Cognition: Evidence from 6- to 7- Month-Old Infants' Object Categorization

Published on: April 19, 2017

Infants use shared experience to interpret pointing gestures.

Kristin Liebal¹, Tanya Behne, Malinda Carpenter

¹Department of Developmental and Comparative Psychology, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, Germany. kliebal@eva.mpg.de

Developmental Science

|January 16, 2009

Summary

One-year-old infants use shared experiences to understand pointing gestures. Even early language learners grasp that specific interactions with an adult influence gesture meaning, crucial for communication.

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Area of Science:

Developmental Psychology
Cognitive Science
Linguistics

Background:

Understanding communicative intent is vital for early language acquisition.
Pointing gestures are a fundamental aspect of human communication.
The role of shared experience in interpreting communicative cues is not fully understood in infants.

Purpose of the Study:

To investigate if 1-year-old infants utilize shared experiences with adults to interpret pointing gestures.
To determine the developmental timeline for understanding context-dependent gestural meaning in infants.
To explore the role of specific adult-infant interactions in pragmatic language development.

Main Methods:

Study 1: Infants (14 and 18 months) experienced different activities with two distinct adults, followed by one adult pointing to an object.
Study 2: 14-month-olds participated in a simplified procedure assessing responses to pointing after shared or unshared activities.
Behavioral responses to pointing gestures were recorded and analyzed based on prior shared experiences.

Main Results:

Eighteen-month-olds, but not 14-month-olds, correctly interpreted the pointing gesture based on the specific activity shared with that adult.
In Study 2, 14-month-olds demonstrated understanding when the pointing adult had previously shared a relevant activity.
Results indicate a developmental progression in infants' ability to link shared experiences to gesture meaning.

Conclusions:

Infants as young as 14 months can understand that shared experiences influence the meaning of pointing gestures.
This demonstrates a complex pragmatic understanding of cooperative communication in early language learners.
Shared individual experiences are crucial for infants' interpretation of social communicative cues.