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Infant-directed speech helps disambiguating the content of ostensive referential communication for human infants| old_uid | 12538 |
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| title | Infant-directed speech helps disambiguating the content of ostensive referential communication for human infants |
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| start_date | 2016/11/08 |
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| schedule | 11h30-13h |
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| online | no |
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| location_info | salle Assia Djebar |
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| details | DEC external seminar series |
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| summary | I will present three recent studies investigating the role of infant-directed speech (IDS) in disambiguating the content of ostensive communication for human infants.
First study suggests that IDS alone enables 6-month-olds to extract directional information from highly ambiguous dynamic luminance-patterns that are typical of the human eye. These results suggest a critical role of IDS in very early sensitivity to the deictic referential gesture of gaze-shift, which allows for finding the referent of communication. I will also discuss recent infant eye-tracking data obtained in a small-scale society of Tanna island in Vanuatu, suggesting that this function of IDS may be culturally universal.
Second series of studies with 13.5-month-olds shows that IDS facilitates encoding of newly demonstrated functions of novel tools as their enduring generic - rather then transient episodic - properties. These results suggest that IDS plays a role in disambiguating the scope of demonstrations and further in stabilizing cultural knowledge. Together the results are consistent with the view that human infants are well equipped to receive ostensive referential communication and that one function of IDS, among other ostensive signals, may be facilitating sensory-motor responses and cognitive processes that enable fixing the referent and encoding the communicated content as generic knowledge. |
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| responsibles | <not specified> |
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