Word Learning Through Eye-Gaze Cues at Ages 12 and 18 Months

This study examined how infants exploit an interlocutor's eye gaze for word learning, using a novel eye-tracking paradigm. The final sample included 25 Hebrew-speaking infants aged 12 and 18 months. Infants completed three experimental phases: (a) a 2-part validation phase: (1) recognition of a familiar object (ball) among two items (ball, bottle) upon hearing its label (e.g., "Where is the ball?"), and (2) exposure to an interlocutor gazing at and talking to an unfamiliar object (rattle) without labeling it (e.g., "Look, it is here"); (b) a learning phase, in which two unfamiliar animal dolls of similar visual salience were presented, and the interlocutor labeled one doll (e.g., "Look, here is bícket"); and (c) a test phase, in which the four objects (ball, rattle, and the two animal dolls) were shown together, and infants were tested to see if they look at the target object upon hearing the learned label (e.g., "Where is bícket?") but not upon hearing a novel label. Eighteen-month-olds followed the interlocutor's gaze more often and attended longer to the labeled object during learning compared with 12-month-olds. In the test phase, both age groups showed word recognition, looking longer at the target object after hearing its label than at familiar or unlabeled distractors, although differences with the visually similar distractor were nonsignificant. When hearing the non-learned word, infants looked longer at the similar distractor. Infants demonstrated word-object learning based on the interlocutor's gaze, with gaze -following abilities strengthening with age.