Parents and Children Jointly Create Multimodal Semantic Regularities During Naturalistic Toy Play.
Melina Knabe1, Jingwen Pang1, Chen Yu1
1Department of Psychology and Center for Perceptual Systems, Austin, TX 88712 USA.
IEEE International Conference on Development and Learning. IEEE International Conference on Development and Learning
|May 11, 2026
Summary
Children learn word meanings by playing with toys. During play, children and parents create semantic connections, showing how early language acquisition builds on shared attention and actions.
Area of Science:
- Developmental Psychology
- Linguistics
- Cognitive Science
Background:
- Early language acquisition involves understanding word meanings and semantic relationships.
- Previous research shows children's awareness of semantic relations, but acquisition from daily interactions is less understood.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate the semantic regularities co-created by parents and children during naturalistic toy play.
- To understand how joint attention and action in play contribute to semantic knowledge acquisition.
Main Methods:
- Observing 44 parent-child dyads during unstructured toy play with 27 categorized toys (food, animals, vehicles).
- Utilizing head-mounted eye-trackers to monitor children's gaze transitions and joint toy selection.
- Analyzing parents' concurrent speech for co-occurring unique words during toy transitions.
Main Results:
- Children preferentially selected toys from the same semantic category as the current toy.
- Toy play exhibited temporal sequences of semantically related toys.
- Children heard more unique words from the same semantic category during same-category toy transitions.
Conclusions:
- Semantic structure in early language learning is actively constructed by children and parents through shared activities.
- Joint attention and action during play are crucial mechanisms for building semantic knowledge from input statistics.
- This study advances understanding of how children acquire rich semantic knowledge from everyday interactions.
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