When learning from human partners, infants and young children will pay attention to nonverbal signals, such as gaze and bodily orientation, to figure out what a person is looking at and why. They may follow gaze to determine what object or event triggered another's emotion, or to learn about the goal of another's ongoing action. They also follow gaze in language learning, using the speaker's gaze to figure out what new objects are being referred to or named.
In this project, we examine whether young children will attend to the same social cues from a robot as from a human partner during a word learning task, specifically gaze and bodily orientation.