Do They Blindly Follow Eye Gaze?

When learning new words, do children use a speaker’s eye gaze because it reveals referential intent? We conducted two experiments that addressed this question. In Experiment 1, the experimenter left while two novel objects were placed where the child could see both, but the experimenter would be able to see only one. The experimenter returned, looked directly at the mutually visible object, and said either, ‘‘There’s the [novel word]!’’ or ‘‘Where’s the [novel word]?’’ Twothrough 4-year-olds selected the target of the speaker’s gaze more often on there trials than on where trials, although only the older children identified the referent correctly at above-chance levels on trials of both types. In Experiment 2, the experimenter placed a novel object where only the child could see it and left while the second object was similarly hidden. When she returned and asked, ‘‘Where’s the [novel word]?’’ 2through 4-year-olds chose the second object at abovechance levels. Preschoolers do not blindly follow gaze, but consider the linguistic and pragmatic context when learning a new word. When learning an object name, young children often assume that the name refers to the object the speaker is looking at, even if the children themselves are looking at a different object when the word is used (e.g., Baldwin, 1991). Eye gaze cannot be a necessary cue for word learning; blind children can learn object names, after all, and children can infer that a word refers to an object even if the speaker is not looking at it (e.g., through mutual exclusivity—Markman & Wachtel, 1988; when learning names for absent referents—Akhtar & Tomasello, 1996). Even so, eye gaze does seem to be sufficient for word learning. What does this indicate about how children learn the meanings of words? Such results are often taken as demonstrating the importance of social cognition in word learning, under the assumption that children use a speaker’s eye gaze as a cue to referential intent (e.g., Bloom, 2000). According to another account, however, children attend to a speaker’s line of regard because of simpler, possibly unlearned, orienting responses (e.g., Moore & Corkum, 1994; but see Woodward, 2003); once they have done so, they come to associate the object they are attending to and the word they are hearing (Smith, Jones, & Landau, 1996; Plunkett, 1997). The precise details of such claims differ, but they share the view that, regardless of what role social cognition plays in other aspects of word learning, this primary and early-emerging sensitivity to eye gaze is unmediated by any inferences about the speaker’s referential intent. The two accounts can be distinguished by what they predict about how mandatory this sensitivity to eye gaze is. If children use gaze cues out of an understanding that eye gaze reflects the speaker’s meaning, gaze information should be exploited when it reveals the speaker’s intent, but ignored when it is irrelevant or uninformative. We tested this hypothesis in two studies. EXPERIMENT 1: VISUAL PERSPECTIVE In Experiment 1, the child and the speaker explored two novel unnamed objects together. Then, in the speaker’s absence, the objects were placed such that the speaker would be able to see only one of them, although the child could see both. The speaker returned, looked at the mutually visible object, and said, ‘‘There’s the [novel word]!’’ or ‘‘Where’s the [novel word]?’’ If children mandatorily follow eye gaze to a target object when learning a new word, they would be expected to map the word to the mutually visible object in both conditions. Alternatively, if children are sensitive to the speaker’s visual perspective and use gaze information in word learning only when it is informative, they would be expected to disregard eye-gaze cues on where Address correspondence to Erika Nurmsoo, University of Bristol, Department of Experimental Psychology, 12a Priory Rd., Bristol, BS8 1TU, Great Britain, e-mail: [email protected]. PSYCHOLOGICAL SCIENCE Volume 19—Number 3 211 Copyright r 2008 Association for Psychological Science trials and instead map the word to the object hidden from the speaker.