As the babies watched intently, an experimenter produced an unusual behavior–she used her forehead to turn on a light.\u00a0But how did babies interpret this behavior? Did they see it as an intentional act, as something worthy of imitating? Or did they see it as a fluke?<\/strong> To answer this question, the experimenter gave 14-month-old infants an opportunity to play with the light themselves.<\/p>\n The results, based on two experiments, show that introducing a novel word for the impending novel event had a powerful effect on the infants\u2019 tendency to imitate the behavior. Infants were more likely to imitate behavior, however unconventional, if it had been named, than if it remained unnamed, the study shows.<\/p>\n When the experimenter announced her unusual behavior (\u201cI\u2019m going to blick the light\u201d), infants imitated her<\/strong>. But when she did not provide a name, they did not follow suit.<\/p>\n This revealed that infants as young as 14 months of age coordinate their insights about human behavior and their intuitions about human language in the service of discovering which behaviors, observed in others, are ones to imitate.<\/p>\n \u201cThis work shows, for the first time, that even for infants who have only just begun to \u2018crack the language code,\u2019 language promotes culturally-shared knowledge and actions \u2013 naturally, generatively and apparently effortlessly,\u201d said Sandra R. Waxman, co-author of the study and the Louis W. Menk Professor of Psychology at Northwestern.<\/p>\n \u201cThis is the first demonstration of how infants\u2019 keen observational skills, when augmented by human language, heighten their acuity for \u2018reading\u2019 the underlying intentions of their \u2018tutors\u2019<\/strong> (adults) and\u00a0foster infants\u2019\u00a0imitation of\u00a0adults\u2019 actions.\u201d<\/p>\n Waxman said absent language and its power in conveying meaning, infants don\u2019t imitate these \u201cstrange\u201d actions.<\/p>\n \u201cThis means that human language provides infants with a powerful key: it unlocks for them a broader world of social intentions<\/strong>,\u201d Waxman said. \u201cWe know that language, and especially the shared meaning within a linguistic community, is one of the most powerful conduits of the cultural knowledge that we humans transmit across generations.\u201d<\/p>\n The study \u201cShall We Blick?\u201d: Novel Words Highlight Actors\u2019 Underlying Intentions for 14-Month-Old Infants\u201d was published in Developmental Psychology in July. Marian L. Chen, a post-doctoral researcher in the Child Cognition Lab at Boston University, is also co-author of the study.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" From the Northwestern University press release by Hilary Hurd Anyaso: A new Northwestern University study shows the power of language in infants\u2019 ability to understand the intentions of others. As… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[9],"tags":[78,13,160,74,25,12],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8178"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8178"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8178\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8210,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8178\/revisions\/8210"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8178"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8178"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8178"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"dad](\"http:\/\/www.therapytoronto.ca\/images\/blogpics\/dad_with_baby.jpg\")
A new Northwestern University study shows the power of language in infants\u2019 ability to understand the intentions of others<\/strong>.<\/p>\n