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      Nonverbal Action Interpretation Guides Novel Word Disambiguation in 12-Month-Olds

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          Abstract

          Whether young infants can exploit sociopragmatic information to interpret new words is a matter of debate. Based on findings and theories from the action interpretation literature, we hypothesized that 12-month-olds should distinguish communicative object-directed actions expressing reference from instrumental object-directed actions indicative of one’s goals, and selectively use the former to identify referents of novel linguistic expressions. This hypothesis was tested across four eye-tracking experiments. Infants watched pairs of unfamiliar objects, one of which was first targeted by either a communicative action (e.g., pointing) or an instrumental action (e.g., grasping) and then labeled with a novel word. As predicted, infants fast-mapped the novel words onto the targeted objects after pointing (Experiments 1 and 4) but not after grasping (Experiment 2) unless the grasping action was preceded by an ostensive signal (Experiment 3). Moreover, whenever infants mapped a novel word onto the object indicated by a communicative action, they tended to map a different novel word onto the distractor object, displaying a mutual exclusivity effect. This reliance on nonverbal action interpretation in the disambiguation of novel words indicates that sociopragmatic inferences about reference likely supplement associative and statistical learning mechanisms from the outset of word learning.

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            Power failure: why small sample size undermines the reliability of neuroscience.

            A study with low statistical power has a reduced chance of detecting a true effect, but it is less well appreciated that low power also reduces the likelihood that a statistically significant result reflects a true effect. Here, we show that the average statistical power of studies in the neurosciences is very low. The consequences of this include overestimates of effect size and low reproducibility of results. There are also ethical dimensions to this problem, as unreliable research is inefficient and wasteful. Improving reproducibility in neuroscience is a key priority and requires attention to well-established but often ignored methodological principles.
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              Infants selectively encode the goal object of an actor's reach.

              Research with young children has shown that, like adults, they focus selectively on the aspects of an actor's behavior that are relevant to his or her underlying intentions. The current studies used the visual habituation paradigm to ask whether infants would similarly attend to those aspects of an action that are related to the actor's goals. Infants saw an actor reach for and grasp one of two toys sitting side by side on a curtained stage. After habituation, the positions of the toys were switched and babies saw test events in which there was a change in either the path of motion taken by the actor's arm or the object that was grasped by the actor. In the first study, 9-month-old infants looked longer when the actor grasped a new toy than when she moved through a new path. Nine-month-olds who saw an inanimate object of approximately the same dimensions as the actor's arm touch the toy did not show this pattern in test. In the second study, 5-month-old infants showed similar, though weaker, patterns. A third study provided evidence that the findings for the events involving a person were not due to perceptual changes in the objects caused by occlusion by the hand. A fourth study replicated the 9 month results for a human grasp at 6 months, and revealed that these effects did not emerge when infants saw an inanimate object with digits that moved to grasp the toy. Taken together, these findings indicate that young infants distinguish in their reasoning about human action and object motion, and that by 6 months infants encode the actions of other people in ways that are consistent with more mature understandings of goal-directed action.
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                Author and article information

                Journal
                Open Mind (Camb)
                Open Mind (Camb)
                opmi
                Open Mind : Discoveries in Cognitive Science
                MIT Press (One Broadway, 12th Floor, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02142 USA journals-info@mit.edu )
                2470-2986
                01 July 2022
                2022
                : 6
                : 51-76
                Affiliations
                [1]Cognitive Development Center, Department of Cognitive Science, Central European University
                [2]Department of Psychological Sciences, Birkbeck, University of London
                Author notes

                Competing Interests: The authors declare no conflict of interest.

                * Corresponding Author: PomiechowskaB@ 123456ceu.edu
                Author information
                https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3819-7641
                https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7044-3056
                Article
                opmi_a_00055
                10.1162/opmi_a_00055
                9692059
                36439064
                4f2423ff-d597-4104-ae37-8be30b26dfd8
                © 2022 Massachusetts Institute of Technology

                This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. For a full description of the license, please visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

                History
                : 16 December 2020
                : 08 April 2022
                Page count
                Pages: 26
                Funding
                Funded by: H2020 European Research Council, DOI 10.13039/100010663;
                Award ID: 742231
                Award Recipient :
                Categories
                Research Article
                Custom metadata
                Pomiechowska, B., & Csibra, G. (2022). Nonverbal Action Interpretation Guides Novel Word Disambiguation in 12-Month-Olds. Open Mind: Discoveries in Cognitive Science, 6, 51–76. https://doi.org/10.1162/opmi_a_00055

                action interpretation,word learning,reference,cognitive development,mutual exclusivity

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