Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Children learn words using a range of social, statistical, and perceptual information. One proposal for how childrendetermine word meanings is cross-situational learning, in which children track ambiguous word-object mappings overtime (e.g., Yu & Smith, 2007). However, previous studies have not evaluated how children use natural social cues duringlearning (e.g., eye gaze). We taught 3-year-olds three novel verbs (c.f., Scott & Fisher, 2012) and hypothesized that socialcues not only support cross-situational learning, but also support retention of verbs after a delay. In between-subjectsconditions, children either did or did not have access to eye-gaze and head-turn cues during exposure. We tested forparticipants learning after 12 learning trials and after a delay. Pilot data suggest that children who have access to naturalsocial cues successfully learned and retained links between novel verbs and their corresponding actions.