Moving beyond "nouns in the lab": Using naturalistic data to understand why infants' first words include uh-oh and hi.

ABSTRACT: Why do infants learn some words earlier than others? Many theories of early word learning focus on explaining how infants map labels onto concrete objects. However, words that are more abstract than object nouns, such as uh-oh, hi, more, up, and all-gone, are typically among the first to appear in infants' vocabularies. We combined a behavioral experiment with naturalistic observational research to explore how infants learn and represent this understudied category of high-frequency, routine-based non-nouns, which we term "everyday words." In Study 1, we found that a conventional eye-tracking measure of comprehension was insufficient to capture U.S.-based English-learning 10- to 16-month-old infants' emerging understanding of everyday words. In Study 2, we analyzed the visual

SUBMITTER: Casey K 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC10872816 | biostudies-literature | 2023 Nov

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature