Young Word Learners’ Interpretations of Words and Symbolic Gestures Within the Context of Ambiguous Reference

Early in development, many word‐learning phenomena generalize to symbolic gestures. The current study explored whether children avoid lexical overlap in the gestural modality, as they do in the verbal modality, within the context of ambiguous reference. Eighteen‐month‐olds’ interpretations of words and symbolic gestures in a symbol‐disambiguation task (Experiment 1) and a symbol‐learning task (Experiment 2) were investigated. In Experiment 1 (N = 32), children avoided verbal lexical overlap, mapping novel words to unnamed objects; children failed to display this pattern with symbolic gestures. In Experiment 2 (N = 32), 18‐month‐olds mapped both novel words and novel symbolic gestures onto their referents. Implications of these findings for the specialized nature of word learning and the development of lexical overlap avoidance are discussed.     

Toward better research on child abuse and neglect: Making definitional issues an explicit methodological concern

In the United States, research on child abuse and neglect is frequently criticized for being poorly performed and largely irrelevant to the important policy questions facing the field. Many of the problems plaguing research on child abuse and neglect are endemic to social science research generally, and this paper does not trod over such issues, which are well known and well described elsewhere. Instead, this paper describes how the inadequacy of definitions of “child abuse” and “child neglect” used by research studies places an additional—and largely unnoticed—burden on research, which aggravates the impact of these more general problems. Existing definitions of “child abuse” and “child neglect” fail to meet research needs because they lack: (1) comparability, (2) reliability, and (3) taxonomic delineation. As a result, they compromise the findings of incidence studies, sequelae studies, etiological studies, and program effectiveness studies. Therefore, if real progress is to be made in understanding child abuse and neglect, definitional issues must become an explicit methodological concern. Specifically, future research should include: (I) a careful determination of definitional needs, (2) the development of operational definitions to meet those needs, and (3) the circumspect statement of findings based on the limitations imposed by such definitions.     

Infants Learn Baby Signs From Video

There is little evidence that infants learn from infant‐oriented educational videos and television programming. This 4‐week longitudinal experiment investigated 15‐month‐olds' (N = 92) ability to learn American Sign Language signs (e.g., patting head for hat) from at‐home viewing of instructional video, either with or without parent support, compared to traditional parent instruction and a no‐exposure control condition. Forced‐choice, elicited production, and parent report measures indicate learning across all three exposure conditions, with a trend toward more robust learning in the parent support conditions, regardless of medium. There were no differences between experimental and control conditions in the acquisition of corresponding verbal labels. This constitutes the first experimental evidence of infants' ability to learn expressive communication from commercially available educational videos.