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Word Learning Through Speaker Gaze in Moderately Preterm Infants at 15 Months
Poster Session F, Friday, October 2, 2:45 - 4:45 pm, Wangari Maathai
Osnat Segal1, Zipora Yegudayev1; 1Department of Communication Disorders, Faculty of Medicine, Tel-Aviv University, Israel
Word learning in infancy forms the foundation of language acquisition and later communication development. Although infants begin to understand and produce words during the first year of life, word learning is a complex developmental process that relies on multiple cognitive and social mechanisms. One prominent theoretical account proposes that infants learn words through both associative learning and social-pragmatic cues, such as following the speaker’s gaze. By relying on eye gaze, infants can infer communicative intent and identify the referent of a novel word, even when it is not perceptually salient. Preterm infants are considered at developmental risk for difficulties in language acquisition and social communication. Previous literature suggests that they may demonstrate impairments in information processing, attentional regulation, executive functioning, and the use of social cues. Consequently, they may experience challenges in learning words through gaze-following during social interactions. Despite growing evidence regarding developmental vulnerabilities among preterm infants, relatively little is known about the ability of moderately preterm infants to learn words through social gaze cues during infancy. The present study examined the ability of 15-month-old moderately preterm infants to learn a novel word in their native language (Hebrew) using the speaker’s eye gaze as a social cue, compared to full-term peers. The study included 66 infants divided into three groups: moderately preterm infants (N = 20) at 15 months chronological age (12 months corrected age), a chronological age-matched full-term control group (N = 27), and a corrected age-matched full-term control group (N = 19). Word-learning ability was assessed using the Intermodal Preferential Looking Paradigm (IPLP). Infants viewed videos presenting a target object and a distractor while the speaker used child-directed speech and directed her gaze toward the target object. Eye-tracking technology was used to measure gaze duration and gaze shifts toward the stimuli. The findings revealed that during the training phase, full-term infants in both age groups showed significantly longer gaze time toward the target object than toward the distractor, whereas moderately preterm infants did not show a significant preference for the target object. In addition, full-term infants spent significantly longer looking at the speaker’s face compared to the target and distractor objects, whereas the preterm group demonstrated no significant differences in gaze allocation among the three stimuli (face, target object and distractor). These findings suggest atypical allocation of visual attention to socially relevant cues among moderate preterm infants. During the test phase, all groups who successfully followed the speaker’s gaze at least once during training demonstrated longer gaze durations toward the target object, indicating successful word learning after brief exposure. In conclusion, moderately preterm infants demonstrated difficulties in following the speaker’s gaze compared to full-term peers. However, preterm infants who successfully followed the speaker’s gaze were capable of learning a novel word through social gaze cues after minimal exposure. These findings highlight the importance of gaze-following processes in early word learning and suggest that atypical social attention mechanisms may contribute to later language vulnerabilities among moderately preterm infants.
Topic Areas: Language Development/Acquisition, Disorders: Developmental