Selective Attention in Early Word Learning: An Eye-Tracking Study on Viewing Naturalistic Egocentric Scenes.

ABSTRACT: To learn a word from an everyday context, infants need to be able to link the heard word with the correct object perceived. A prevailing view of the early learning environment is that infants' world is bombarded with objects and words. Therefore, it is difficult to find the named object from many possible candidates. However, building correct word-referent mappings relies on in-moment visual selection, it is not clear what infants attend to when learning words in a naturalistic context. Toward this goal, we conducted an eye-tracking experiment in which 12-month-old infants were presented with complex visual scenes extracted from infants' egocentric videos recorded during naturalistic parent-child toy play. These scenes were selected at naming moments when parents labeled a toy object durin

SUBMITTER: Zhang Y 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC12365944 | biostudies-literature | 2025 Jul-Aug

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature