Advancing research in infant language and cognitive development through eye-tracking

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

This proposal is to fund the purchase of an eye-tracker and associated hardware/software to study language and cognitive development in infants and toddlers. Looking behaviour is the foremost window into the contents of infants' minds, and eye-tracking allows researchers to tackle questions that cannot be addressed with more coarse-grained methods. Our work has revealed sophisticated language and cognitive capacities in infants and toddlers, previously thought to emerge much later in development. However, the processing mechanisms underlying their performance remain unclear. For example, we have demonstrated that young infants make probability judgments - but their ability to generate expectations of the world based on probabilistic information (a requirement if such information is going to play a significant role in learning) is unknown. In the language domain, our work suggests that toddlers' ultimate interpretations of words in different contexts shows remarkable parallels to adults' - but it is unclear what information and alternative interpretations toddlers consider as they process words in different contexts. The requested equipment has the potential to significantly advance our understanding of early speech, language, and cognitive processing, by providing data at the temporal and spatial resolution required for answering such critical questions.