Into the Minds of Babies

Social Cues
Baldwin and various colleagues investigated young children's sensitivity to social cues - such as gaze direction, body posture, gestures, emotional expression and more - as a source of information about word meaning. The research shows, for instance, that children as young as 12-18 months spontaneously check where a speaker is looking when she utters a word that is new to them, and link the word with the object the speaker is looking at. In this way, infants avoid many potential word learning errors. They link words with the correct objects - the ones speakers are indeed referring to - rather than to whatever objects happen to be capturing their own attention when new words are heard. "Being so active in using social cues," notes Baldwin, "radically facilitates children's language learning."

In more recent research, Baldwin and a team of colleagues found that autistic children lack these skills for making use of social cues to guide word learning, which leaves them prone to errors in the word learning process. This research provides evidence for a connection between autistic children's known deficits in social understanding and their known delays in acquiring language.

Knowledge vs. Ignorance
With doctoral student Mark Sabbagh, Baldwin has also been studying whether three and four year old children evaluate another person's apparent level of knowledge when acquiring a new word. "Understanding the distinction between knowledge and ignorance, enables one to be a better world learner," Baldwin explains. "For example, imagine you've got a three-year-old who's fascinated by dinosaurs, and she asks her parents to name this or that dinosaur. The adult might say, "I'm not sure, but it might be a pteranodon." The child should really not learn that label, because the adult is not sure. At the very least, she should peg it with some uncertainty." The two researchers have found that, indeed, young children are less likely to remember a word linked to an object if an adult speaker expresses uncertainty about whether the label is correct.

Intentions
Baldwin's previous research suggests that infants as young as 12-18 months are able to understand something about the intentions that underlie people's behavior. Infant's abilities in this respect are remarkable given that human behavior tends to occur in a complex, rapid and continuous stream. Baldwin is now investigating the origins of these impressive abilities.