The present research investigated whether six-month-olds who rarely produce pointing actions can detect the object-directedness and communicative function of others’ pointing actions when linguistic information is provided. In Experiment 1, infants were randomly assigned to either a novel-word or emotional-vocalization condition. They were first familiarized with an event in which an actor uttered either a novel label (novel-word condition) or exclamatory expression (emotional-vocalization condition) and then pointed to one of two objects. Next, the positions of the objects were switched. During test trials, each infant watched the new-referent event where the actor pointed to the object to which the actor had not pointed before or the old-referent event where the actor pointed to the old object in its new location. Infants in the novel-word condition looked reliably longer at the new-referent event than at the old-referent event, suggesting that they encoded the object-directedness of the actor’s point. In contrast, infants in the emotional-vocalization condition showed roughly equal looking times to the two events. To further examine infants’ understanding of the communicative aspect of an actor’s point using a different communicative context, Experiment 2 used an identical procedure to the novel-word condition in Experiment 1, except there was only one object present during the familiarization trials. When the familiarization trials did not include a contrasting object, we found that the communicative intention of the actor’s point could be ambiguous. The infants showed roughly equal looking times during the two test events. The current research suggests that six-month-olds understand the object-directedness and communicative intention of others’ pointing when presented with a label, but not when presented with an emotional non-speech vocalization.

本研究调查了在提供语言信息时，很少产生指点动作的 6 个月大的婴儿是否能够检测到他人指点动作的对象指向性和交际功能。在实验 1 中，婴儿被随机分配到一个新词或情绪发声条件。他们首先熟悉一个事件，其中演员说出一个新标签（新词条件）或感叹词（情绪发声条件），然后指向两个对象之一。接下来，对象的位置被切换。在测试试验期间，每个婴儿都观看了新指涉事件，其中演员指向了演员以前没有指向过的对象，或者演员在新位置指向旧对象的旧指涉事件。与旧指涉事件相比，小说词条件下的婴儿对新指涉事件的观察时间更长，这表明他们编码了演员点的对象指向性。相比之下，处于情绪发声状态的婴儿对这两个事件的观察时间大致相同。为了使用不同的交际语境进一步检验婴儿对演员观点的交际方面的理解，实验 2 使用了与实验 1 中的新词条件相同的程序，只是在熟悉试验期间只有一个物体存在。当熟悉试验不包括对比对象时，我们发现演员点的交流意图可能是模棱两可的。在两次测试中，婴儿的观看时间大致相同。