The birth of words: ten-month-olds learn words through perceptual salience.

A core task in language acquisition is mapping words onto objects, actions, and events. Two studies investigated how children learn to map novel labels onto novel objects. Study 1 investigated whether 10-month-olds use both perceptual and social cues to learn a word. Study 2, a control study, tested whether infants paired the label with a particular spatial location rather than to an object. Results show that 10-month-olds can learn new labels and do so by relying on the perceptual salience of an object instead of social cues provided by a speaker. This is in direct contrast to the way in which older children (12-, 18-, and 24-month-olds) learn and extend new object names.