期刊名称：Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
印刷版ISSN：0027-8424
电子版ISSN：1091-6490
出版年度：2021
卷号：118
期号：52
DOI：10.1073/pnas.2107019118
语种：English
出版社：The National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
摘要：Significance
Human infants learn object names by mapping heard names to perceived things. The key challenge to this learning is referential uncertainty: For any heard name, there are many candidate referents with variable perceptual properties. Previous experimental research on how infants solve this problem has been based on different assumptions about the nature of this uncertainty. The present study quantifies the degrees of referential uncertainty by measuring infants’ real-time attention to the potential referents when parents name unfamiliar objects. We discovered an unexpected bimodal distribution of infant attention to the intended referents in parent speech during everyday parent–infant interactions, which redefines the century-long puzzle of referential uncertainty as a problem in the sampling of data for learning.
The learning of first object names is deemed a hard problem due to the uncertainty inherent in mapping a heard name to the intended referent in a cluttered and variable world. However, human infants readily solve this problem. Despite considerable theoretical discussion, relatively little is known about the uncertainty infants face in the real world. We used head-mounted eye tracking during parent–infant toy play and quantified the uncertainty by measuring the distribution of infant attention to the potential referents when a parent named both familiar and unfamiliar toy objects. The results show that infant gaze upon hearing an object name is often directed to a single referent which is equally likely to be a wrong competitor or the intended target. This bimodal gaze distribution clarifies and redefines the uncertainty problem and constrains possible solutions.
