Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

When caregivers talk to their children, they can also look, point or manipulate the objects they are talking about. Thesemultimodal indexical cues can help the child disambiguate the referred object from potential targets in the environmentduring word learning. In fact, most naming episodes are modulated by some multimodal cues. In the work we presenthere, we use data from a semi-naturalistic corpus of caregiver-child interactions (ECOLANG corpus) where caregiverstalk to their children about objects that are new or known to the child. We focus on caregivers production and ask: (i)how often caregivers use any of the multimodal cues when naming the referent for new vs. known objects; (ii) what thetemporal relationship between multimodal cues and naming episodes is; (iii) whether there is a relationship between thecue usage (and its temporal distribution) and word learning.