Eye Gaze Does Not Attenuate Cognitive Load on 14-Month-Olds' Word-Object Associative Learning for Minimal Pairs

It is well established in developmental science that 14-month-old infants have significant difficulty associating pairs of objects with pairs of words that differ by a single phoneme (i.e., minimal pairs). This study used a traditional switch procedure in two experimental conditions (i.e., no face versus face with shifting gaze) to habituate infants with objects and minimal pair labels. Additionally, infants participated in a joint attention task and parents completed questionnaires related to family demographics and infant health and development, to compare to switch task performance. It was expected that infants' difficulty with minimal pair associative learning would be replicated in the no face condition. It was also predicted that the addition of a female face and the cues it could provide would abate the challenge that this task typically presents. As a group, infants' performances in the two conditions were not significantly different from each other and were not significantly different from chance. Analyses explored the relations between switch performance, joint attention task performance and questionnaire data, resulting in a significant correlation between performance in the face condition of the switch task and number of ear infections (r = .62, p < .05). Taken together, the addition of a female face with shifting gaze to a challenging word learning task does not sufficiently attenuate the cognitive load created by the task. The implications of these results are discussed further.

Name thesis:degree_name

Master of Science

Level thesis:degree_level

masters

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Psychology

Department dc:contributor.department

Psychology

Grantor dc:publisher

Virginia Tech

Year dc:date.issued

2013

Author dc:creator

• Mills-Smith, Laura A.

Chair dc:contributor.committeechair

• Panneton, Robin K.

Committee members dc:contributor.committeemember

• Deater-Deckard, Kirby
• Fritz, Matt

• Social Attention
• Word Learning
• Habituation
• Switch Task

Statement dc:rights

• In Copyright

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/

Dc Identifier Other

etd-05142013-201223

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:vtechworks.lib.vt.edu:10919/32779