Young infants can learn object and action-words from continuous audiovisual streams
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2018
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Tesis (Doctor en Psicología)--Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, 2018
This doctoral thesis explored whether and how preverbal infants can discovernovel words associated with objects and actions from a continuous audiovisual stream.Specifically, we tested infants on their ability to associate a novel word that systematicallyco-occurred with a stationary face (for object-words) and a novel word that systematicallyco-occurred with moving faces (for action-words). Moreover, this doctoral thesis seeks toexplore what phonological cues infants rely on and will help to succeed in this learningprocess and also if infants can generalize the learning of action-words into new visualstimuli.In study 1 we tested 5-month-old infants on the learning of these two types ofwords from a continuous audiovisual task. The results showed that in global, most infantslearned the image-word associations, however, some of them learned only the objectwords,other only the action-words and others succeeded to learn both. We interpretedsuch pattern of the results as an index of the interindividual variability especially relatedto the cognitive resources that the infants recruited to solve the task.In study 2, in a series of 4 experiments, we evaluated older infants i.e. 8-montholdinfants and we facilitated the task by adding vowel or consonant harmony to either theobject or the action words. The results showed that infants were able to learn both objectsand action-words from the continuous audiovisual streams only when words conveyedvowel harmony. We interpreted these results as vowels may have a role in early ages dueto the perceptual salience in audiovisual task.An additional experiment in progress, evaluated whether ~7-month-old infantsgeneralized the learning of novel action-words to novel agents (novel moving faces notpresented during familiarization). Our results indicated that infants failed to generalizeaction words to new agents. In sum, the results of these thesis showed that from very earlyages infants can associate what they hear with what they see from continuous audiovisualstreams, when audiovisual stimuli are interesting and facilitated the task. Such initialassociations might correspond to primary forms of the word-mapping observed later stepsof language acquisition.
This doctoral thesis explored whether and how preverbal infants can discovernovel words associated with objects and actions from a continuous audiovisual stream.Specifically, we tested infants on their ability to associate a novel word that systematicallyco-occurred with a stationary face (for object-words) and a novel word that systematicallyco-occurred with moving faces (for action-words). Moreover, this doctoral thesis seeks toexplore what phonological cues infants rely on and will help to succeed in this learningprocess and also if infants can generalize the learning of action-words into new visualstimuli.In study 1 we tested 5-month-old infants on the learning of these two types ofwords from a continuous audiovisual task. The results showed that in global, most infantslearned the image-word associations, however, some of them learned only the objectwords,other only the action-words and others succeeded to learn both. We interpretedsuch pattern of the results as an index of the interindividual variability especially relatedto the cognitive resources that the infants recruited to solve the task.In study 2, in a series of 4 experiments, we evaluated older infants i.e. 8-montholdinfants and we facilitated the task by adding vowel or consonant harmony to either theobject or the action words. The results showed that infants were able to learn both objectsand action-words from the continuous audiovisual streams only when words conveyedvowel harmony. We interpreted these results as vowels may have a role in early ages dueto the perceptual salience in audiovisual task.An additional experiment in progress, evaluated whether ~7-month-old infantsgeneralized the learning of novel action-words to novel agents (novel moving faces notpresented during familiarization). Our results indicated that infants failed to generalizeaction words to new agents. In sum, the results of these thesis showed that from very earlyages infants can associate what they hear with what they see from continuous audiovisualstreams, when audiovisual stimuli are interesting and facilitated the task. Such initialassociations might correspond to primary forms of the word-mapping observed later stepsof language acquisition.