Word learning is hands-on: Insights from studying natural behavior

Infants' interactions with social partners are richly multimodal. Dyads respond to and coordinate their visual attention, gestures, vocalizations, speech, manual actions, and manipulations of objects. Although infants are typically described as active learners, previous experimental research has often focused on how infants learn from stimuli that is well-crafted by researchers. Recent research studying naturalistic, free-flowing interactions has explored the meaningful patterns in dyadic behavior that relate to language learning. Infants' manual engagement and exploration of objects supports their visual attention, creates salient and diverse views of objects, and elicits labeling utterances from parents. In this chapter, we discuss how the cascade of behaviors created by infant multimodal attention plays a fundamental role in shaping their learning environment, supporting real-time word learning and predicting later vocabulary size. We draw from recent at-home and cross-cultural research to test the validity of our mechanistic pathway and discuss why hands matter so much for learning. Our goal is to convey the critical need for developmental scientists to study natural behavior and move beyond our "tried-and-true" paradigms, like screen-based tasks. By studying natural behavior, the role of infants' hands in early language learning was revealed-though it was a behavior that was often uncoded, undiscussed, or not even allowed in decades of previous research. When we study infants in their natural environment, they can show us how they learn about and explore their world. Word learning is hands-on.