Early referential understanding: Infants' ability to recognize referential acts for what they are.

Abstract

Previous research has documented infants' ability to follow adults' line-of-regard and pointing gestures by 9-12 months of age, but it has not been clear whether infants appreciate that such cues are a privileged source of information about word reference. Study 1 demonstrated that this is understood by at least 19-20 months: Infants wed referential cues to guide a new word-object mapping even though this required that they ignore competition from temporal contiguity. In Study 2, the effects observed in Study 1 were not obtained with actions that served to enhance the salience of an object nonreferentially (e.g., manipulating without looking), suggesting that infants appreciate that actions that accompany labeling are not necessarily referential