Caregivers’ gestures direct infant attention during early word learning: the importance of dynamic synchrony Nancy de Villiers Rader a,⇑,1 , Patricia Zukow-Goldring b,1,2 a Psychology Department, Ithaca College, 1119 Williams Hall, Ithaca, NY 14850, United States b Linguistics Department, University of Southern California, LA, CA 90089, United States article info Article history: Available online 26 April 2012 Keywords: Word learning Gesture Language development Eye tracking Infancy Attention abstract How do young infants discover word meanings? We have theorized that caregivers educate infants’ attention (cf. Gibson, J.J., 1966) by synchronizing the saying of a word with a dynamic gesture displaying the object/referent (Zukow-Goldring, 1997). Detecting an amo- dal invariant across gesture and speech brackets the word and object within the auditory and visual flow of events and constitutes the basis for perceiving them as belonging together (Zukow-Goldring and Rader, 2001; cf. Spence, 2007). To test the effect of gesture on infant attention and word learning, we presented 9–14-month-old infants with videos of speakers using synchronous dynamic, static, or asynchronous dynamic gestures. We hypothesized that infants would attend more to the object at the time the word was spo- ken when the gesture was dynamic and synchronous with speech and that this synchrony would result in better word learning. We found that infants looked more at the object at the critical time and displayed better word learning in the dynamic synchronous condition compared with the other gesture conditions. These results highlight the key role that syn- chronizing word and gesture plays in infants’ learning of the correspondence between word and referent. Ó 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction On an ordinary day in any home, multiple sources of sight and sound inundate the senses. Consequently, the problem of how a typically developing infant might detect the relation between word and referent when both are immersed in different, continuous flows of perceptual information (auditory and visual) appears daunting. We have suggested that caregivers assist in this task by synchronizing their speech with dynamic gestures, directing attention to an object as they simultaneously introduce the word that refers to that object 3 (Zukow, 1990; Zukow-Goldring, 1997; Zukow and Rader, 2001). We propose that by leading the infant to attend to the object at the same time the word referring to it is spoken, word and referent are processed together in such a way as to support early word learning. Such gestures, we believe, are particularly important prior to the in- fant’s ability to follow the pointing or eye gaze of the speaker. To test these notions, we presented young infants with word-referent pairs in the context of a dynamic-synchronous gesture, a static or held gesture, and a dynamic-asynchronous 0388-0001/$ - see front matter Ó 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.langsci.2012.03.011 ⇑ Corresponding author. E-mail address: rader@ithaca.edu (Nancy de Villiers Rader). 1 These authors contributed significantly to this work. 2 Present address: Center for the Study of Women, University of California, LA, United States. 3 We selected the word-object pairing as the initial focus of our investigations into early word learning, because studies have documented that infants in many language communities around the world comprehend and produce a greater proportion of object words early on (Caselli et al., 1995; Fenson et al., 1994; Jackson-Maldonado et al., 1993). Language Sciences 34 (2012) 559–568 Contents lists available at SciVerse ScienceDirect Language Sciences journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/langsci