Korean 7-month-old infants can understand pointing gesture as goal-directed when some linguistic cue is provided (언어 정보를 이용한 만 7개월 한국 영아들의 가리키기 행동의 목표 지향성 이해 능력)

LEE JI HYUN (이지현); Hyun-joo Song (송현주); 김민영

Korean 7-month-old infants can understand pointing gesture as goal-directed when some linguistic cue is provided

THE KOREAN JOURNAL OF DEVELOPMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY
2012, 25(1), pp.63~75
Publisher : The Korean Society For Developmental Psychology
Research Area : Social Science > Psychological Science

LEE JI HYUN ¹, Hyun-joo Song ¹, 김민영 ²

¹연세대학교
²(주) 휴노

Accredited

ABSTRACT

The present study examined whether Korean 7-month-old infants can understand the goal-directedness of others’ pointing gestures when linguistic information is provided. Korean 7-month-old infants were familiarized with an event in which an actor pointed to one of the two novel objects with her index finger after saying a novel label, “mido”(Experimental condition) or a Korean exclamatory expression “woowa” (Control condition). After the positions of the two objects were switched, the infants watched the actor pointing to the new-goal object (new-goal event) or the old-goal object (old-goal event) in the test trials. The infants in the experimental condition looked significantly longer at the new-goal event than the old-goal event. The infants in the control condition looked at the new-goal and the old-goal events about equally, indicating that other linguistic cues such as an exclamation of surprise do not facilitate infants’ understanding of goal-directedness of others’ pointing gestures. The results suggest that seven-month-old infants understand the goal-directedness of the actor’s pointing gesture when some linguistic cue is provided even though they cannot produce their own goal-directed pointing gestures yet.

KEYWORDS

pointing behaior, linguistic cue, goal-directedness

Journal Copyright Policy

This license enables reusers to distribute, remix, adapt, and build upon the material in any medium or format for noncommercial purposes only, and only so long as attribution is given to the creator.

Citation status

* References for papers published after 2025 are currently being built.

[journal] 김민영 / 2008 / Korean 9- and 7-month-old infants’ ability to encode the goals of others’ pointing actions / 한국심리학회지: 발달 / 한국심리학회 산하 한국발달심리학회 21(3) : 41~61

[journal] 이현진 / 2003 / Theory of Mind and Language: Based on Children's Comprehension / 한국심리학회지: 발달 / 한국심리학회 산하 한국발달심리학회 16(1) : 47~68

[journal] Balaban, M. T. / 1997 / Do words facilitate object categorization in 9-month-old infants? / Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 64(1) : 3~26

[journal] Biro, S. / 2007 / Infants’ perception of goal-directed actions : Development through cue-based bootstrapping / Developmental Science 10(3) : 379~398

[journal] Carpenter, M. / 1998 / Social cognition, joint attention, andcommunicative competence from 9 to 15months of age / Monographs of the Societyfor Research in Child Development 63(4)

[journal] Csibra, G. / 2003 / One-year-old infants use teleologicalrepresentations of actions productively / Cognitive Science 27(1) : 111~133

[journal] de Villiers, J. G. / 2007 / The interface of language and Theory of Mind / Lingua 117(11) : 1858~1878

[journal] Fernald, A. / 1993 / Approval and disapproval : Infant responsiveness to vocal affect in familiar and unfamiliar languages / Child Development 64(3) : 657~674

[journal] Ferry, A. L. / 2010 / Categorization in 3-and4-month-old infants : An advantage ofwords over tones / Child Development 81(2) : 472~479

[journal] Fulkerson, A. L. / 2007 / Words(but not tones)facilitate object categorization : evidence from 6-and 12-month-olds / Cognition 105(1) : 218~228

[journal] Lempers, J. D. / 1979 / Young children’s production and comprehension of nonverbal deictic behaviors / The Journal of Genetic Psychology 135(1) : 93~102

[journal] Leung, E. H. / 1981 / Development of pointing as a social gesture / Developmental Psychology 17(2) : 215~220

[journal] Luo, Y. / 2005 / Can a self-propelled box have a goal? Psychological reasoning in 5-month-old infants / Psychological Science 16(8) : 601~608

[journal] Phillips, A. T. / 2002 / Infants’ ability to connect gaze andemotional expression to intentional action / Cognition 85(1) : 53~78

[journal] Sodian, B. / 2004 / Infants’ understanding of looking, pointing, and reaching as cues to goal-directed action / Journal of Cognition and Development 5(3) : 289~316

[journal] Sommerville, J. A. / 2005 / Action experience alters 3-month-old infants' perception of others' actions / Cognition 96(1) : B1~B11

[journal] Tomasello, M. / 2007 / A New look at infant pointing / ChildDevelopmen 78(3) : 705~722

[journal] Woodward, A. L. / 1998 / Infants selectively encode the goal object of an actor’s reach / Cognition 69(1) : 1~34

[journal] Woodward, A. L. / 2002 / Infants’ understanding of the point gesture as an object-directed action / Cognitive Development 17(1) : 1061~1084

[journal] Woodward, A. L. / 2000 / Twelve-month-old infants interpret action in context / Psychological Science 11(1) : 73~77

[journal] Xu, F. / 2002 / The role of language in acquiring object kind concepts in infancy / Cognition 85(3) : 223~250

This paper was written with support from the National Research Foundation of Korea.

KJCKorea
Journal Central

THE KOREAN JOURNAL OF DEVELOPMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY 2025 KCI Impact Factor : 1.27