Visual Attention Is Not Enough: Individual Differences in Statistical Word-Referent Learning in Infants

Recent evidence shows that infants can learn words and referents by aggregating ambiguous information across situations to discern the underlying word-referent mappings. Here, we use an individual difference approach to understand the role of different kinds of attentional processes in this learning: 12- and 14-month-old infants participated in a cross-situational word-referent learning task in which the learning trials were ordered to create local novelty effects, effects that should not alter the statistical evidence for the underlying correspondences. The main dependent measures were derived from frame-by-frame analyses of eye gaze direction. The fine-grained dynamics of looking behavior implicates different attentional processes that may compete with or support statistical learning. The discussion considers the role of attention in binding heard words to seen objects, individual differences in attention and vocabulary development, and the relation between macro-level theories of word learning and the micro-level dynamic processes that underlie learning.