abstractBy the end of their first year, infants can interpret many different types of complex dynamic visual events, such as caused-motion, chasing, and goal-directed action. Infants of this age are also in the early stages of vocabulary development, producing their first words at around 12 months. The present work examined whether there are meaningful individual differences in infants’ ability to represent dynamic causal events in visual scenes, and whether these differences influence vocabulary development. As part of the longitudinal Language 0–5 Project, 78 10-month-old infants were tested on their ability to interpret three dynamic motion events, involving (a) caused-motion, (b) chasing behaviour, and (c) goal-directed movement. Planned analyses found that infants showed evidence of understanding the first two event types, but not the third. Looking behaviour in each task was not meaningfully related to vocabulary development, nor were there any correlations between the tasks. The results of additional exploratory analyses and simulations suggested that the infants’ understanding of each event may not be predictive of their vocabulary development, and that looking times in these tasks may not be reliably capturing any meaningful individual differences in their knowledge. This raises questions about how to convert experimental group designs to individual differences measures, and how to interpret infant looking time behaviour.

中文翻译：

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10 个月时对复杂动态事件的理解能预测词汇量的发展吗？

摘要到第一年结束时，婴儿可以解释许多不同类型的复杂动态视觉事件，例如引起运动、追逐和目标导向的动作。这个年龄段的婴儿也处于词汇发展的早期阶段，大约在 12 个月大时会产生第一个单词。目前的工作检查了婴儿在视觉场景中表示动态因果事件的能力是否存在有意义的个体差异，以及这些差异是否会影响词汇发展。作为纵向语言 0-5 项目的一部分，测试了 78 名 10 个月大的婴儿解释三个动态运动事件的能力，包括 (a) 引起运动、(b) 追逐行为和 (c) 目标-定向运动。计划分析发现，婴儿显示出理解前两种事件类型的证据，但不是第三种。每项任务中的观察行为与词汇发展没有有意义的相关性，任务之间也没有任何相关性。额外的探索性分析和模拟的结果表明，婴儿对每个事件的理解可能无法预测他们的词汇发展，并且这些任务中的查看时间可能无法可靠地捕捉到他们知识中任何有意义的个体差异。这就提出了如何将实验组设计转化为个体差异测量，以及如何解释婴儿看时间行为的问题。额外的探索性分析和模拟的结果表明，婴儿对每个事件的理解可能无法预测他们的词汇发展，并且这些任务中的查看时间可能无法可靠地捕捉到他们知识中任何有意义的个体差异。这就提出了如何将实验组设计转化为个体差异测量，以及如何解释婴儿看时间行为的问题。额外的探索性分析和模拟的结果表明，婴儿对每个事件的理解可能无法预测他们的词汇发展，并且这些任务中的查看时间可能无法可靠地捕捉到他们知识中任何有意义的个体差异。这就提出了如何将实验组设计转化为个体差异测量，以及如何解释婴儿看时间行为的问题。