Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Children rapidly learn the word-object mappings even though they are facing the challenge of referential uncertainty(Quine,1960). When parents read books to their infants, how do infants learn to associate the words with multiple objectson the page. Using data from parent-child book reading interactions, we analyzed moment-by-moment eye movement datato examine the role of gesture and statistical cues on word learning. Specifically, we investigated 1) whether parent’s andchild’s gestures could direct the child’s attention to the object named by the parent during naturalistic storybook reading; 2)given that parents repeatedly name objects, how statistical information across multiple instances could provide convergingevidence of the correct word-object mapping? Using data jointly created by parents and children in everyday book readingcontext, we demonstrated that both gesture cues and statistical information across multiple instances could dramaticallyreduce referential ambiguity and provide converging evidence of the correct word-object mappings.