Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

A core issue in the study of word learning is understanding how beginning learners cope with referential ambiguityin the clutter of natural learning environments, and how parents may help them find the referent in that clutter. Here we ask howsensitive parents are in taking advantage of optimal visual moments where a single object is visually large in view to providelinguistic labels for their infants. Using a mini-head camera, we recorded parent-child free play interactions and studied theparent naming events for 12 and 30 month old children from the infant-perspective in a context of high clutter (30 objectsdumped on the floor). Despite the cluttered context, parents and infants frequently created infant-perspective scenes in whichone object was visually singled out. At both age levels, parents named objects in these moments of visual clarity and almostnever named objects in sub-optimal moments.