From Play to Language: Infants’ Actions on Objects Cascade to Word Learning

Subset of data drawn from parent volume (https://nyu.databrary.org/volume/563) of 18- and 23-month-old walking infants during natural activity in the home with caregivers. Infants build knowledge by acting on the world. We conducted a rigorous, ecologically-grounded test of the active-word learner hypothesis—that infants’ engagement with objects in the home environment elicits caregiver naming and cascades to learning object names. Our home-based study extends lab-based theories to identify real-world processes that support infant word learning. Frame-by-frame coding of 2-hour-video recordings of 32 mothers and their 18- to 23-months-olds focused on infant manipulation and mother and infant naming of 245 unique objects. Objects manipulated by infants and named by mothers during natural recordings were more likely to appear in infants’ vocabularies and spontaneous speech relative to non-manipulated objects that were not named. Furthermore, vocabularies of 5,520 infants hosted on Wordbank revealed early age of acquisition for words of objects that mothers named and infants manipulated. Infants actively build object-word mappings from everyday engagements with objects in the context of social partners. Available under materials are coding manuals for transcription and infant object play coding developed as part of the Play & Learning Across a Year project (http://www.play-project.org; http://doi.org/10.17910/b7.876)