ISSN : 1229-0718
In the current research we used the violation-of-expectation paradigm to examine whether 10-month-olds use linguistic cues when understanding others’ goals. During four (short-familiarization condition) or six (long-familiarization condition) familiarization trials, 10-month-olds heard a female agent saying “Here’s a modi!” twice and saw her grasping one of two objects. The locations of the two objects were switched during the pre-display trial. During test trials, infants heard a different linguistic cue (“Here’s a papu!”), and saw the actor reach for either the same object as before (the old-goal event) or the other object (the new-goal event). Ten-month-olds looked longer at the new-goal event than at the old-goal event in the short-familiarization condition, whereas they looked about equally at the two events in the long-familiarization condition. These results demonstrate 10-month-olds’ understanding that an agent’s novel verbal information may signal a change in her upcoming actions.
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