Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

A proto-understanding of absent reference (reference to absent entities) emerges around 12 months provided with richcontextual support, infants look and point to the location of a displaced object. When can infants understand absent ref-erence without contextual support? We modified the procedure from Hendrickson and Sundara (2017) who showed thatwith very minimal pre-exposure and no demonstration of referent displacement, 14-month-olds identify absent referents offamiliar words. Fourteen- and 16-month-olds first listened to passages containing target words, while viewing a checker-board. Then, two objects the referent and a distractor appeared on the screen. We analyzed infants’ looking to the targetduring 3 seconds from the onset of image display. Only 16-month-olds looked significantly above chance, suggestingthat listening to the passages activated their representations of the referents. These results are the first to show that by 16months, infants can retrieve mental representations of objects upon just hearing their labels.