19-month-old infants use speaker knowledge to evaluate referential accuracy

Resumen de los autores

Infants in the second year of life have demonstrated pragmatic competence by considering a communicating partner’s epistemic state to home in on their intended meaning. Here we provide a new investigation into this ability using the N400 ERP component to index semantic processing and thus removing extraneous task demands that may be difficult for children of this age. Nineteen-month-old infants watched trials in which an agent placed a novel object into a box, and then either saw (seen swap) or did not see (unseen swap) it replaced with a second novel object. The agent then pointed at the box and provided a novel label. We measured the N400 ERP component in response to this novel label, which while unfamiliar, was likely correct in the seen swap-, and incorrect in the unseen swap trials. If infants interpret the agent’s referential information as likely incorrect when she has not seen the swap, they may show a semantic mismatch effect indicated by a larger negativity for unseen-swap trials. However, infants exhibited a significantly larger amplitude N400 in response to the novel label when the agent had seen the object switch, than when she had not. This indicates that infants considered the speaker’s epistemic state and the N400 effect reflected greater engagement in establishing a word-referent link when the communicator’s reference was likely correct, possibly due to an effort towards word learning. This interpretation is supported by a strong correlation between the N400 amplitude and infants’ parent-reported receptive vocabulary, suggesting a possible link between ability to interpret others’ communicative intention based on their epistemic access, and word acquisition.

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Cómo citar (APA 7)

Kampis, D., & Southgate, V. (2026). 19-month-old infants use speaker knowledge to evaluate referential accuracy. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/n29c4_v1