Fourteen-month-olds follow how others understand words

Bálint Forgács, Eugenio Parise, Gergely Csibra, György Gergely, Judit Gervain, null [s.n.] (Editor)

Research output: Contribution to conference typesPaper

Abstract (may include machine translation)

We set out to investigate the interplay between semantic comprehension and Theory-of-Mind capacities in 14-month-old infants. We wanted to know how infants’ brain process the linguistic (mis)understanding of an adult communicative partner in an object naming paradigm involving false beliefs, by recording event-related potentials. We presented infants with various toys that are likely to be known to them (e.g., shoe, apple, book, etc.), and named them in the presence of an adult observer. In half of the trials, we changed the object without the knowledge of the observer and named the new one, thus it was congruent from the perspective of the infant, but incongruent from the perspective of the observer. In the baseline condition the object naming was congruent for both parties. To confirm that we can evoke a typical N400, an electrophysiological marker of semantic comprehension, we also run a control experiment, where both parties heard either congruent or incongruent labels for objects. First, according to the control experiment, infants reacted to labels incongruent from their perspective with a typical N400, a greater negativity in the 400-600 ms time window. Secondly, in the main experiment, when labels were congruent from infants’ own perspective, but incongruent for the observer, we again found an N400 response, statistically not different from that of the control experiment. Additionally, we found a later frontal negativity as well. Infants, like adults, seem to use very similar neural resources to understand language and to track the comprehension of a communicative partner.
Original languageEnglish
Pages44
Number of pages1
StatePublished - 2018
Event
Budapest CEU Conference on Cognitive Development, 2018: BCCCD, 2018
- Budapest
Duration: 4 Jan 20186 Jan 2018

Conference

Conference
Budapest CEU Conference on Cognitive Development, 2018: BCCCD, 2018
CityBudapest
Period4/01/186/01/18

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