Infant word learning investigated through the habituation technique

Words are the foundation of our ability to communicate with language. Thus, learning words is one of the most important aspects of child development. Children learn words at a rapid pace with seeming ease, despite the fact that associating linguistic form and meaning is not a trivial task. When an adult uses a word that is novel to a child, say, 'rabbit', and point to a rabbit, the word could be referring to a number of different things: the rabbit (as intended by the adult), a part of the rabbit (e.g., the ears), the action of the rabbit, etc.. How, then, do children figure out the meaning of a novel word? There are various proposals as to how children narrow down possible meanings of a novel word. For example, children may assume that a word refers by default to the whole object (e.g., a rabbit) rather than its parts (Markman & Wachtel, 1988). In the proposed project, we explore another mechanism, which children may use in addition to other mechanisms. Namely, we hypothesise that intuition about the 'natural' correspondence between the sound and the meaning of a word (called 'sound symbolism') helps children constrain possible meanings of a word. It is known that certain pairing of the sound and the meaning feels natural to us. For example, when presented with a round object and a spiky angular object, the label 'maluma' matches the former object, and the label 'tateke' matches the latter (Köhler, 1929). This intuition is shared by speakers of different languages, for example, people in Great Britain and people in Tanzania (e.g., Davies, 1969). We will investigate if such sound symbolism helps children narrow down the meaning of novel words, thereby helping word learning. The aim of the proposed experiment is to test the hypothesis that sensitivity to universal sound symbolism scaffolds the word learning process. More specifically, the objective is to test whether sound symbolism helps 12 and 14-month-old infants to rapidly form an association between a label and an object. The key measure for this test is how long infants look at visual stimuli while a combination of a label and an object is repeatedly presented ('the habituation technique'). Through the repeated exposure, the infant become habituated to the combination and starts to lose interest and look away from the visual display. When we present a new combination of a label and an object, the infant becomes interested and looks at the visual display again. Such a pattern of behaviours can tell us whether the infants formed an association between a label and an object and whether they can distinguish different combinations. Testing infants with the habituation technique requires a specialist lab and knowledge. The fellowship will enable Dr. Kita to learn how to set up such a lab and the knowledge required from the habituation technique from the world's leading expert, Prof. Janet Werker (Univ. of British Columbia, Canada). The outcome of the proposed study will provide us with deeper understanding of the mechanism for word learning in children. This will have a theoretical impact in psychology and linguistics. The results may lead to a future application in clinical interventions for children with word learning difficulties.

Learning words is one of the most important aspects of child development. Children learn words at a rapid pace with seeming ease, despite the fact that associating linguistic form and meaning is not a trivial task. When an adult uses a word that is novel to a child, say, 'rabbit', and point to a rabbit, the word could be referring to a number of different things: the rabbit (as intended by the adult), a part of the rabbit (e.g., the ears), the action of the rabbit, etc.. How, then, do children figure out the meaning of a novel word? The proposed project will investigate a mechanism that infants may use to narrow down possible referents of a novel word. Namely, we hypothesise that intuition about the 'natural' correspondence between the sound and the meaning of a word (so called 'sound symbolism') helps children constrain possible meanings of a word. For example, when presented with a round object and a spiky angular object, the label 'maluma' matches the former object, and the label 'tateke' matches the latter (Köhler, 1929). This intuition is shared by speakers of different languages, for example, people in Great Britain and people in Tanzania (e.g., Davies, 1969). We will test if such sound symbolism helps children narrow down the meaning of novel words, thereby helping word learning. The aim of the proposed experiment is to test the hypothesis that sensitivity to universal sound symbolism scaffolds the word learning process. More specifically, the objective is to test whether sound symbolism helps 12 and 14-month-old infants to rapidly form an association between a label and an object, using the habituation technique as implemented in Stager and Werker (1997). Testing infants with the habituation technique requires a specialist lab and knowledge. The fellowship will enable Dr. Kita to learn how to set up such a lab and the knowledge required from the habituation technique from the world's leading expert, Prof. Janet Werker.