To hear and to hold: Maternal naming and infant object exploration

To acquire language, infants must associate the language they hear with concurrent nonlinguistic experiences - the word-world mapping problem. Caregivers help structure the infant´s environment by monitoring infants´ attention and producing speech at informative times. In particular, children´s learning of object names depends on their sensory experiences at times when objects are named. At 18 months, children´s learning of novel words is predicted by the size of the object in their visual field when it is named [1]. However, there is not a direct relationship between infant´s attention to objects in the world and speech produced by caregivers. Infant´s multimodal experiences unfold in interactions with caregivers where both partners´ behavior, including vocalizations, gaze, and manual activity, dynamically structure the visual and auditory scene [2,3].