Elena Luchkina

Harvard University | Harvard · Department of Psychology

The present studies examined relative contributions of different mechanisms underlying children's selective word learning. Experiment 1 tested 3-4-year-olds' learning of novel labels provided by informants who established their (in)accuracy by asking questions about familiar objects and mentioning correct or incorrect labels, and subsequently label...

Eyetracking measures, which provide crucial insight into processes underlying human language cognition, perception and social behavior, are particularly important in research with preverbal infants. Until recently, infant eye gaze analysis required either expensive corneal-reflection eyetracking technology or labor-intensive manual annotation (codi...

Recent research suggests that caregivers’ speech in response to their infants’ attentional shifts (‘follow-in speech’) is correlated with vocabulary size. It is not yet clear, however, what possible developmental pathways underlie this correlation. One possibility is that follow-in speech, and follow-in naming in particular, directly contributes to...

Human language permits us to call to mind representations of objects, events, and ideas that we cannot witness directly, enabling us to learn about the world far beyond our immediate surroundings. This essential capacity requires a referential link between words and representations of perceptually unavailable items. When and how does this link emer...

Previous research shows that infants of parents who are more likely to engage in socially contingent interactions with them tend to have larger vocabularies. An open question is how social contingency facilitates vocabulary growth. One possibility is that parents who speak in response to their infants more often produce larger amount of language in...

Human language permits us to call to mind objects, events, and ideas that we cannot witness directly, either because they are absent or because they have no physical form (e.g., people we have not met, concepts like justice). What enables language to transmit such knowledge? We propose that a referential link between words, referents, and mental re...

Previous research shows that infants of parents are more likely to engage in socially contingent interactions with their infants tend to have larger vocabularies. An open question is how social contingency facilitates vocabulary growth. One possibility is that parents who speak in response to their infants more often produce larger amount of langua...

Human language permits us to call to mind objects, events, and ideas that we cannot witness directly. We learn and reason about people we have never met, about time that hasn’t yet passed, and about abstract concepts, such as justice or abelian groups. We readily communicate about such phenomena, learn new information about them, and when (and if)...

The ability to learn from verbal testimony increases exponentially our communicative and representational reach, permitting us to learn, reason and communicate about objects and events that are not perceptually available. But it remains less clear is what capacities give rise to our ability to learn from verbal information alone. We propose that th...

Human language permits us to call to mind objects, events, and ideas that we cannot witness directly. This capacity requires that one links words not only to their referents, but to mental representations of those referents. Together with the recognition that words are used intentionally for communication, this link constitutes ‘verbal reference.’...

Verbal reference is the ability to use language to communicate about objects, events, or ideas, even if they are not witnessed directly, such as past events or faraway places. It rests on a three-way link between words, their referents, and mental representations of those referents. A foundational human capacity, verbal reference extends the commun...

In the first year of life, infants' word learning is slow, laborious, and requires repeated exposure to word-referent co-occurrences. In contrast, by 14-18 months, infants learn words from just a few labeling events, use joint attention and eye gaze to decipher word meaning, and begin to use speech to communicate about absent things. We propose tha...

Human language permits us to call to mind objects, events, and ideas that we cannot witness directly. This capacity rests upon abstract verbal reference: the appreciation that words are linked to mental representations that can be established, retrieved and modified, even when the entities to which a word refers is perceptually unavailable. Althoug...

In the first year of life, infants’ word learning is slow, laborious, and requires long, repeated exposure to word-referent co-occurrences. In contrast, by 14-18 months, infants learn words from just a few labeling events, use joint attention and eye-gaze to decipher word meaning, and begin to use speech to communicate about absent things. We propo...

Human language permits us to call to mind objects, events, and ideas that we cannot witness directly. This capacity rests upon abstract verbal reference: the appreciation that words are linked to mental representations that can be established, retrieved and modified, even when the entities to which a word refers is perceptually unavailable. Althoug...

The comprehension of abstract verbal reference–speech that refers to objects, events or ideas that are perceptually unavailable–is pivotal to infants’ language acquisition. It permits infants to engage in language-mediated learning, such as learning about remote places, imaginary situations, or past events that cannot be witnessed directly. At issu...

This study examined how inferences about epistemic competence and generalized labeling errors influence children’s selective word learning. Three‐ to 4‐year‐olds (N = 128) learned words from informants who asked questions about objects, mentioning either correct or incorrect labels. Such questions do not convey stark differences in informants’ epis...

A nascent understanding of absent reference emerges around 12 months: provided with rich contextual support, infants look and point to the location of a displaced object. When can infants understand absent reference without contextual support? Using a procedure modified from Hendrickson and Sundara (2017), 13- and 16-month-olds first listened to ut...

Word learning is a social act. Because there is an arbitrary relation between words and their meaning, children must learn words from other people. Other people, however, are not always reliable sources of knowledge. People can be ignorant, hold false beliefs, or simply be deceptive. How do children evaluate the reliability of sources of knowledge...

Children use speakers' past accuracy to make inferences about novel word meanings those individuals provide in the future. An open question is whether children can retrospectively reevaluate information after learning that the source was inaccurate. We addressed this question in two experiments where a speaker first introduced labels for novel obje...

The present studies examine whether and how 18-month-olds use informants’ accuracy to acquire novel labels for novel objects and generalize them to a new context. In Experiment 1, two speakers made statements about the labels of familiar objects. One used accurate labels and the other used inaccurate labels. One of these speakers then introduced no...

Do children use causal data and social information in conjunction to guide their interventions? We examined whether 2-year-olds (N = 120, 40 in each experiment) were able to appreciate the difference between causally efficacious and inefficacious actions presented intentionally. Toddlers who did appreciate such a difference preferentially used inte...