Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

How infants determine correct word-referent pairings withincomplex environments is not yet fully understood. Thecombination of multiple cues, including gestures, may guidelearning as part of a communicative exchange between parentand child. Gesture use and word learning are interlinked, withearly child gesture predicting later vocabulary size, andparental gesture predicting child gesture. However, the extentto which parents alter gesture cues during word learningaccording to referential uncertainty is not known. In this study,we manipulated the number of potential referents acrossconditions during a word learning task with 18–24-month-olds,and explored how changes in parental gesture use translatedinto infant word learning. We demonstrate that parents altertheir gesture use according to the presence, but not the degree,of referential uncertainty. We further demonstrate that a degreeof variability in the number of potential referents appears tobenefit word learning.