Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

What leads to successfully attended naming events? To map novel labels onto novel objects, children must attend to the correct objects around during naming events. The current study investigates, through a bottom-up approach, which behavioural dynamics lead to successfully attended naming events. In a semi-naturalistic head-mounted eye-tracking study, we tested 23 caregiver-child dyads (17 signing, 19 non-signing). Children acquiring a sign language are known to distribute their visual attention differently from children acquiring a spoken language. The current study investigates if differences in language modality lead to differences in the behavioural dynamics of attended and unattended naming events. Findings suggest that successfully attended naming events follow different behavioural dynamics than unattended naming events and that effects of language modality are most prominent in the amount of mutual gaze between children and their caregivers.