The impact of goal saliency and verbal information on selective imitation in 16- to 18-month-olds.

This study aimed to assess which action component (movement or goal) infants prioritize in their imitation behavior when they get information about its relevance from two important sources: perceptual goal saliency and experimenter's verbal information. 16- to 18-month-olds (N = 72) observed how the experimenter moved a toy mouse with a hopping or sliding movement onto one of two empty spaces (low goal saliency) or 2D circles (medium saliency), or inside one of two 3D houses (high saliency). Before the demonstration, the experimenter verbally announced the movement style or the goal. Results showed that verbal action descriptions did not influence infants' imitation. However, matching previous findings, infants imitated the goal more often than the movement in the high-saliency condition, and the movement more often than the goal in the low-saliency condition. Moreover, in the novel medium-saliency condition, infants imitated both components equally often. Thus, selective imitation varied as a function of perceptual goal saliency, but not of verbal cues. This suggests that perceptual features can enhance infants' bottom-up processing and imitation of action components, while the impact of top-down processes based on verbal cues may vary depending on task characteristics and infants' verbal abilities, inducing a need for further research.

Better in sync: Temporal dynamics explain multisensory word-action-object learning in early development.

We investigated the temporal impact of multisensory settings on children's learning of word-object and action-object associations at 1- and 2-years of age. Specifically, we examined whether the temporal alignment of words and actions influenced the acquisition of novel word-action-object associations. We used a preferential looking and violation of expectation task in which infants and young children were first presented with two distinct word-object and action-object pairings either in a synchronous (overlapping in time) or sequential manner (one after the other). Findings revealed that 2-year-olds recognized both, action-object and word-object associations when they first saw the word-action-object combinations synchronously, but not sequentially, as evidenced by looking behavior. 1-year-olds did not show evidence for recognition for either of the word-object and action-object pairs, regardless of the initial temporal alignment of these cues. To control for individual differences, we explored factors that might influence associative learning based on parental reports of 1- and 2-year-olds development, however, developmental measures did not explain word-action-object associative learning in either group. We discuss that while young children may benefit from the temporal alignment of multisensory cues as it enables them to actively engage with the multisensory content in real-time, infants may have been overwhelmed by the complexity of this input.

Words and arbitrary actions in early object categorization: weak evidence for a word advantage.

Both words and gestures have been shown to influence object categorization, often even overriding perceptual similarities to cue category membership. However, gestures are often meaningful to infants while words are arbitrarily related to an object they refer to, more similar to arbitrary actions that can be performed on objects. In this study, we examine how words and arbitrary actions shape category formation. Across three conditions (word cue, action cue, word-action cue), we presented infants (N = 90) with eight videos of single-category objects which vary in colour and other perceptual features. The objects were either accompanied by a word and/or an action that is being performed on the object. Infants in the word and action condition showed a decrease in looking over the course of the familiarization phase indicating habituation to the category, but infants in the word-action condition did not. At test, infants saw a novel object of the just-learned category and a novel object from another category side-by-side on the screen. There was some evidence for an advantage for words in shaping early object categorization, although we note that this was not robust across analyses.