"The Effects of Visual Dominance and Object Naming on Word Learning in " by Ryann Mehney, Calista Burke et al.
 

Faculty Mentor(s)

Dr. Lauren Slone, Psychology

Document Type

Poster

Event Date

4-11-2025

Abstract

Children learn new words every day, a majority of which are nouns (e.g., car, dog, ball). This raises the question: how do infants connect the correct words to each object? Previous research suggests that infants as young as 12 months can learn object names by tracking which words and objects appear together (Smith & Yu, 2008). Additionally, object names may be learned better when the object being named is visually dominant, meaning larger in the infant's view (Yu & Smith, 2012). However, this correlation has not been tested experimentally. This study tests whether visual dominance enhances word learning in infants. Thirty-two infants (17 females; M age = 12.9 months, SD = 4.1) participated in a standard object-name learning task similar to that of Smith and Yu (2008). However, in our task, infants viewed on a screen four "target" objects that we modified to be presented as larger (dominant) than eight "distractor" objects. In each trial, a target object was presented along with two distractor objects. In the Naming condition, target objects were named; in the No-Naming control group, they were not. After 160 training trials, word learning was assessed by how long infants looked at the correct target object when it was named, using eye-tracking. If learning occurs, we expect infants to look longer at the named target object in the Naming condition. Results showed that infants did not look longer at named target objects in the Naming condition compared to the No-Naming control. This suggests that, even though target objects were visually dominant, infants were not learning the object names. A follow-up study is underway with equally-sized objects to further explore the role of visual dominance in word learning and will compare effects of visual dominance in both conditions.

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