JOINT-ATTENTIONAL STATES AND LEXICAL ACQUISITION AT 18 MONTHS

Two groups of 18-month-old infants were observed during a relatively natural play session with an adult experimenter and several toys. A novel object associated with one of the toys was labeled a dodo by the experimenter using either an attention-following strategy (i.e., introducing the label when the infant was focused on the dodo object) or an attention-switching strategy (i.e., introducing the label when the infant was focused on an alternative object). With factors such as frequency of exposure to the object label and infant compliance equivalent across the groups, infants in the attention-following procedure were more likely to correctly identify the dodo object in a subsequent comprehension task. These experimental data corroborate previous correlational observations suggesting that early lexical development is facilitated during interactions in which the caregiver is following rather than leading the infant's focus of attention.