Conflicting Social Cues: Fourteen- and 24-Month-Old Infants' Reliance on Gaze and Pointing Cues in Word Learning

Language acquisition is a process embedded in social routines. Despite considerable attention in research to its social nature, little is known about developmental differences in the relative priority of certain social cues over others during early word learning. Employing an eye-tracking paradigm, we presented 14-month-old infants, 24-month-old infants, and adults with movies in which an actor repeatedly gazed at one and pointed to the other of two objects while presenting them with a novel word. The results show that the 14-month-old infants pay more attention to a model's eye gaze when learning to map a novel word to a referent, whereas 24-month-old infants and adults rely more on pointing cues. Our results provide evidence for a developmental change in the relative priority of pointing versus eye-gazing cues in language acquisition.