Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

A nascent understanding of absent reference emerges around 12months: provided with rich contextual support, infants look and pointto the location of a displaced object. When can infants understandabsent reference without contextual support? Using a proceduremodified from Hendrickson and Sundara (2017), 13- and 16-month-olds first listened to utterances containing familiar target words, whileviewing a checkerboard. Then, two objects – a referent and a distractor(e.g., a cup and a shoe) – appeared on the screen. Only 16-month-oldsdemonstrated a reliable looking preference for the referents, suggestingthat listening to the utterances activated their mental images of thereferents. These results establish that at 16 months, infants comprehendreference to absent entities without any contextual support.