Toddlers' language-mediated visual search: They need not have the words for it

Abstract

Eye movements made by listeners during language-mediated visual search reveal a strong link between visual processing and conceptual processing. For example, upon hearing the word for a missing referent with a characteristic colour (e.g., “strawberry”), listeners tend to fixate a colour-matched distractor (e.g., a red plane) more than a colour-mismatched distractor (e.g., a yellow plane). We ask whether these shifts in visual attention are mediated by the retrieval of lexically stored colour labels. Do children who do not yet possess verbal labels for the colour attribute that spoken and viewed objects have in common exhibit language-mediated eye movements like those made by older children and adults? That is, do toddlers look at a red plane when hearing “strawberry”? We observed that 24-month-olds lacking colour term knowledge nonetheless recognized the perceptual–conceptual commonality between named and seen objects. This indicates that language-mediated visual search need not depend on stored labels for concepts.

Keywords:

• Colour
• Lexical processing
• Visual attention
• Visual search
• Language development
• Toddler word recognition
• Conceptual development

Acknowledgments

We thank A. Khadar and the rest of the Nijmegen Baby Lab crew, as well as all of the participating families, for their assistance with this study. We would also like to thank two anonymous reviewers for their comments on this research. Support was provided by the Max Planck Society and an NWO (Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research) Spinoza Prize entitled “Native and Non-Native Listening” awarded to A. Cutler. Additional support was provided to E.K.J. by CFI (Canada Foundation for Innovation), NSERC (Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada), and the University of Toronto. This research was presented at IASCL (International Association for the Study of Child Language) in Edinburgh, Scotland (July, 2008).