Browsing by Author "Johnson, Jennie"

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    Examining the Role of Attention and Intention in Two-year-olds’ Acquisition of Novel Words
    (Enfance, 2011-09) Graham, Susan; Nilsen, Elizabeth S.; Friesen, Chris Kelland; Johnson, Jennie
    Previous studies have demonstrated that infants will use an adult’s eye-gaze direction to identify the intended referent of a novel word (e.g., Baldwin, 1991). Here we examine the possibility that eye-gaze may be triggering attention to an object because of the directional nature of eye-gaze itself. In the first study, we demonstrated that 24-month-olds mapped a novel word to a novel object that had appeared at the location cued by a non-referential cue (i.e., flashing lights). The results of the second study, however, suggest that gaze direction cues do not operate in a similar fashion to non-referential cues. That is, while cueing a specific object with a gaze direction cue led infants to map a novel word to that object, cueing an object location with gaze direction did not result in meaningful word learning. These findings suggest that infants view gaze direction as a marker of intentionality.