Children’s interests guide word learning in referentially ambiguous situations

Young children are often faced with referentially ambiguous situations, where they hear a novel word and are uncertain about the intended referent in the cluttered visual scenes they encounter daily. In the current study, we examined the extent to which children infer that a novel label refers to an object of greater interest to them relative to an object of lesser interest. Thirty-four 30- to 36-month-old children participated in an eyetracking task. First, we examined children’s interest in objects from four semantic categories using three measures of interest: the relative amount of time children spent looking at the novel objects from the different categories, pupillary arousal to familiar objects from the different categories, and pupillary arousal to the novel objects. We then measured children’s target looking in a following test phase. We found that children’s interest in a novel object – as indexed by the looking time – predicted children’ mapping of a novel label with this object. Children mapped the previously heard novel label to their object of interest, and showed a different pattern of looking when presented with a supernovel label. Furthermore, parents’ evaluation of children’s interest in the category to which the object belonged modulated children’s word-object mapping, highlighting the interplay between children’s situational interest in a novel object and their individual interest in the category of the object. We consider the social environment in which such a hit-and-miss strategy could yield successful learning in early development, highlighting the role of children’s interests in driving vocabulary development.