Prof. Katharina Rohlfing & Eugenia Wildt | Joint action is more than join attention: infants' word learning in social interaction

Commonly, the problem of learning a word is presented in an intrapersonal way: a child has to follow adult's attention, and – once the referent is perceived – to map it onto a word. In this presentation, we will present an alternative and interpersonal approach (Rohlfing et al., 2016): Word learning is a joint and collaborative endeavor. Accordingly, early words are used in the context of specific action goals. In our study, 10-month-olds learned two new words presented by an experimenter in two different conditions: Joint action vs. joint attention. We hypothesized that infants, who experienced the new word within a joint action, perform better in a retrieval test, compared to infants from the joint attention condition, in which the referent was labeled ostensively but no goal was reached collaboratively. Infants learning progress was assessed with an Intermodal Preferential Looking paradigm by using an eye tracker. The result showed that neither of the two groups could retrieve the word-object-link. However, we found a difference in word-object-processing, according to which infants' perception of the object's saliency changed. This difference suggests that joint activities, and not only the joint focus, unfold a powerful social context for word learning.

Poster