Does the understanding of complex dynamic events at 10 months predict vocabulary development?

Durrant, S; Jessop, A; Chang, F; Bidgood, A; Peter, MS; Pine, JM; Rowland, CF

Abstract

By the end of their first year, infants can interpret many different types of complex dynamic visual events, such as caused-motion, chasing, and goal-directed action. Infants of this age are also in the early stages of vocabulary development, producing their first words at around 12 months. The present work examined whether there are meaningful individual differences in infants’ ability to represent dynamic causal events in visual scenes, and whether these differences influence vocabulary development. As part of the longitudinal Language 0–5 Project, 78 10-month-old infants were tested on their ability to interpret three dynamic motion events, involving (a) caused-motion, (b) chasing behaviour, and (c) goal-directed movement. Planned analyses found that infants showed evidence of understanding the first two event types, but not the third. Looking behaviour in each task was not meaningfully related to vocabulary development, nor were there any correlations between the tasks. The results of additional exploratory analyses and simulations suggested that the infants’ understanding of each event may not be predictive of their vocabulary development, and that looking times in these tasks may not be reliably capturing any meaningful individual differences in their knowledge. This raises questions about how to convert experimental group designs to individual differences measures, and how to interpret infant looking time behaviour.

Citation

Durrant, S., Jessop, A., Chang, F., Bidgood, A., Peter, M., Pine, J., & Rowland, C. (2021). Does the understanding of complex dynamic events at 10 months predict vocabulary development?. Language and Cognition, 13(1), 66-98. https://doi.org/10.1017/langcog.2020.26

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Jul 14, 2020
• Online Publication Date: Aug 12, 2020
• Publication Date: Mar 1, 2021
• Deposit Date: Aug 17, 2020
• Publicly Available Date: Aug 17, 2020
• Journal: Language and Cognition
• Print ISSN: 1866-9808
• Electronic ISSN: 1866-9859
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press (CUP)
• Volume: 13
• Issue: 1
• Pages: 66-98
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/langcog.2020.26
• Publisher URL: https://doi.org/10.1017/langcog.2020.26
• Related Public URLs: http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayJournal?jid=LCO
• Additional Information: Access Information : Published gold open access; Projects : International Centre for Language and Communicative Development