Frances Dunham

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

Social Contingency Effects on Subsequent Perceptual-Cognitive Tasks in Young Infants.

3 experiments with 3-month-old infants compared the effects of contingent and noncontingent adult-infant social interactions on subsequent infant-controlled habituation and choice tasks. Infants who experienced a prior noncontingent social interaction tended to adopt response strategies that reduced the density of stimulation during these subsequent nonsocial tasks. The results are discussed in terms of their generality and the types of mechanisms that might mediate these transfer effects from social to nonsocial procedures.

Two-year-olds' sensitivity to a parent's knowledge state: Mind reading or contextual cues?

Two experiments were designed to determine if children at 27 and 33 months of age tailor their communicative behaviours to the knowledge states of their social partners. In each study, an experimenter placed a desirable object into one of two opaque containers. The child was then required to ask for a parents assistance in retrieving the object. In one condition, the parent covered her eyes during sticker placement (parent ignorant condition); in a second condition, the parents eyes were open during sticker placement (parent knowledgeable condition); and in a third condition, the parent first covered her eyes but then opened them during placement of the sticker (sham ignorant condition). The results indicated that children at both ages were appropriately employing a pointing gesture more often in the parent ignorant condition than in the parent knowledgeable condition. However, children responded to the sham hiding condition differently at the two ages. In the sham condition, older children appropriately gestured less than in the parent ignorant condition. However, the younger children were equally likely to use gestures in the sham condition and the parent ignorant condition. Considered together, the data suggest that different factors are controlling the selective use of gestures in these two age groups.

The Confused Robot: Two‐Year‐Olds’ Responses to Breakdowns in Conversation

Preschool children at two ages conversed with a toy robot during a play session. During the conversations the robot inserted either general (e.g., What?) or specific (e.g., Piggy is in what?) contingent queries in response to selected utterances. The children’s replies to these breakdowns in conversation indicated they were sensitive to the pragmatic requirements of these different types of query. By 33 months of age, the children replied to general queries with complete repetitions of their prior misunderstood utterance, and replied to specific queries with only the required constituentinformation. At 27 months of age, the children’s predominant strategy was to reply to both forms of query with complete repetitions, although the data suggest some degree of sensitivity to these different forms is also present in this younger group. These results are interpreted in terms of children’s sensitivity to Grice’s (1975) quantity rule and the potential changes in social cognition underlying children’s compliance with this rule.