English- and Mandarin-learning infants' discrimination of actions and objects in dynamic events

The present studies examined the role of linguistic experience in directing English and Mandarin learners' attention to aspects of a visual scene. Specifically, they asked whether young language learners in these 2 cultures attend to differential aspects of a word-learning situation. Two groups of English and Mandarin learners, 6-8-month-olds (n = 65) and 17-19-month-olds (n = 91), participated in 2 studies, based on a habituation paradigm, designed to test infants' discrimination between actions and objects in dynamic events. In Study 1, these stimuli were presented in silence, whereas in Study 2, a verbal label accompanied videos. Results showed that 6-8-month-olds could discriminate action changes but not object changes, whereas 17-19-month-olds could discriminate both types of changes. However, there were only very subtle cross-linguistic differences in these patterns when the scenes were presented together with a verbal label. These findings show strong evidence for universal developmental trends in attention, with somewhat weaker evidence that the differences in the types of words Mandarin- versus English-learning children produce or are exposed to affect attention to different aspects of a scene in the first 2 years of life.