{"pk":26404,"title":"Examining Referential Uncertainty in Naturalistic Contexts from the Child’s\nView: Evidence from an Eye-Tracking Study with Infants","subtitle":null,"abstract":"Young infants are prolific word learners even though they are\nfacing the challenge of referential uncertainty (Quine, 1960).\nMany laboratory studies have shown that human infants are\nskilled at inferring the correct referent of an object from\nambiguous contexts (Swingley, 2009). However, little is\nknown regarding how children visually attend to and select the\ntarget object among many other objects in view when parents\nname it during free play interactions. In the current study, we\nexplored the looking pattern of 12-month-old infants using\nnaturalistic first person images with varying degrees of\nreferential ambiguity. Our data suggest that infants’ attention\nis selective and they tend to only select a small subset of objects\nto attend to at each learning instance despite the complexity of\nthe data existed in the real world. This work allows us to better\nunderstand how perceptual properties of objects in infants’\nview influence their visual attention, which is also related to\nhow they select candidate objects to build word-object\nmappings.","language":"eng","license":{"name":"","short_name":"","text":null,"url":""},"keywords":[{"word":"statistical learning; word-referent mapping;\nlearning mechanisms"}],"section":"Papers","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4t1945bn","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Yayun","middle_name":"","last_name":"Zhang","name_suffix":"","institution":"Indiana University","department":""},{"first_name":"Chen","middle_name":"","last_name":"Yu","name_suffix":"","institution":"Indiana University","department":""}],"date_submitted":null,"date_accepted":null,"date_published":"2016-01-01T18:00:00Z","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/26404/galley/16040/download/"}]}