Anja Gampe

Eighteen-month-olds learn novel words through overhearing

The prototypical word learning situation in western, middle-class cultures is dyadic: an adult addresses a child directly, ideally in a manner sensitive to their current focus of attention. But young children also seem to learn many of their words in polyadic situations through overhearing. Extending the previous work of Akhtar and colleagues, in the current two studies we gave 18-month-old infants opportunities to acquire novel words through overhearing in situations that were a bit more complex: they did not socially interact with the adult who used the new word before the word learning situation began, and the way the adult used the new word was less transparent in that it was neither a naming nor a directive speech act. In both studies, infants learned words equally well (and above chance) whether they were directly addressed or had to eavesdrop on two adults. Almost from the beginning, young children employ diverse learning strategies for acquiring new words.

How preschoolers react to norm violations is associated with culture

Children from the age of 3years understand social norms as such and enforce these norms in interactions with others. Differences in parental and institutional education across cultures make it likely that children receive divergent information about how to act in cases of norm violations. In the current study, we investigated whether cultural values are associated with the ways in which children react to norm violations. We tested 80 bicultural 3-year-olds with a norm enforcement paradigm and analyzed their reactions to norm violations. The reactions were correlated to the childrens parental cultural values using the Global Leadership and Organizational Behavior Effectiveness (GLOBE) scales, and these results show that parental culture was associated with childrens reactions to norm violations. The three strongest correlations were found for institutional collectivism, performance orientation, and assertiveness.

Intra-individual variability and continuity of action and perception measures in infants

The development of action and perception, and their relation in infancy is a central research area in socio-cognitive sciences. In this Perspective Article, we focus on the developmental variability and continuity of action and perception. At group level, these skills have been shown to consistently improve with age. We would like to raise awareness for the issue that, at individual level, development might be subject to more variable changes. We present data from a longitudinal study on the perception and production of contralateral reaching skills of infants aged 7, 8, 9, and 12 months. Our findings suggest that individual development does not increase linearly for action or for perception, but instead changes dynamically. These non-continuous changes substantially affect the relation between action and perception at each measuring point and the respective direction of causality. This suggests that research on the development of action and perception and their interrelations needs to take into account individual variability and continuity more progressively.

Imitation is beneficial for verb learning in toddlers

Abstract The interplay between action and language is still not fully understood in terms of its relevance for early language development. Here, we investigated whether action imitation may be beneficial for first language acquisition. In a word-learning study 24-, 30- and 36-month-old children (N = 96) learned the labels of different actions in one of two conditions: Either the children just observed the experimenter producing the action (observation condition) or children produced the action themselves (action condition). The results show that 36-month-olds learned the labels of the more complex actions in both conditions, whereas 30-month-olds learned the labels only in the action but not in the observation condition. These findings suggest that action imitation is beneficial for verb learning early in life.

BILEX: A new tool measuring bilingual children’s lexicons and translational equivalents

The current study describes the development and validation of a novel scale (BILEX) designed to assess young bilingual children’s receptive vocabulary in both languages, their conceptual vocabulary, and translational equivalents. BILEX was developed to facilitate the assessment of vocabulary size for both of the children’s languages within one session without any transfer from one language to the other. One-hundred-and-eighty-two 3-year-old children participated in the studies of reliability and validity. Psychometric properties have very good consistency and reliability, along with good concurrent, construct, and criteria validity.