Browsing by Author "Mills-Smith, Laura A."

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    Eye Gaze Does Not Attenuate Cognitive Load on 14-Month-Olds' Word-Object Associative Learning for Minimal Pairs
    Mills-Smith, Laura A. (Virginia Tech, 2013-05-02)
    It is well established in developmental science that 14-month-old infants have significant difficulty associating pairs of objects with pairs of words that differ by a single phoneme (i.e., minimal pairs). This study used a traditional switch procedure in two experimental conditions (i.e., no face versus face with shifting gaze) to habituate infants with objects and minimal pair labels. Additionally, infants participated in a joint attention task and parents completed questionnaires related to family demographics and infant health and development, to compare to switch task performance. It was expected that infants' difficulty with minimal pair associative learning would be replicated in the no face condition. It was also predicted that the addition of a female face and the cues it could provide would abate the challenge that this task typically presents. As a group, infants' performances in the two conditions were not significantly different from each other and were not significantly different from chance. Analyses explored the relations between switch performance, joint attention task performance and questionnaire data, resulting in a significant correlation between performance in the face condition of the switch task and number of ear infections (r = .62, p < .05). Taken together, the addition of a female face with shifting gaze to a challenging word learning task does not sufficiently attenuate the cognitive load created by the task. The implications of these results are discussed further.
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    The Role of Contingency and Ostensive Cues on Infants' Cognitively Demanding Word-Object Learning
    Mills-Smith, Laura A. (Virginia Tech, 2016-07-27)
    Older infants are good referential learners. That is, at around 14-months of age, they begin to learn the verbal labels of objects and events around them. However, referential learning can be made more challenging by increasing the lexical similarity between labels. The primary goal of this study was to examine whether an adult speaker's ostensive cues and eye gaze-object contingency could augment referential learning in 14-month-old infants under difficult conditions (i.e., minimal pair labels). In Experiment 1, infants were familiarized and tested on two word-object associations with minimal pairs (e.g., "bin" and "din"), presented on an eye-tracker. Importantly, each session began when infants made eye contact with a female speaker on the screen, and she continually looked at and verbally referenced each object in an infant-directed style. On test trials when the familiar object+label was switched, infants significantly increased their visual scanning of the speaker's mouth compared to control trials. In Experiment 2, the same procedure was followed with a new group of 14-month-olds, except that the speaker now looked in the opposite direction from the objects on the screen, but continued to label them with minimal pairs in an infant-directed style. In contrast to the results of Experiment 1, infants in this latter experiment did not differentially attend to any area of her face during the switch trials. This pattern of results shows that the ostensive nature of a social partner augments infants' referential learning under cognitive challenge, but it is the contingent nature of the speaker's regard to what is being labeled that is a necessary factor in promoting learning.