How do infants perceive communication?
The project 'Information transmission in language: Do infants perceive communicative intent?' (COMINTENT) explored whether infants realise that speakers not only offer a message, but that there is also a purpose behind this transmission of information. Specifically, the study examined if, when and how infants begin to recognise verbal communication as a purposeful act. To this end, research involved both monolingual and bilingual infants. This population varied in age and numbered around 300, while the adult subjects numbered some 700. Researchers investigated whether, and under what conditions, infants expect others to share a language. Another line of inquiry focused on the inferences infants draw when a communicative code is shared. Additionally, research examined how infants and adults learn about important carriers of communicative load in language. This load includes words and how they are organised in terms of syntax. Further, the team studied low-level cues that observers use to track and remember individuals who are socially relevant to them. COMINTENT worked on creating a software package that analyses eye tracking data, and developed various computational models of certain aspects related to language acquisition. Although the project funding period has ended, results on collected data are still being analysed. Notwithstanding, the project intends to publish the data and models advanced in at least 10 peer-reviewed papers. The project's experiments are among the first targeting perception of both speaker and listener intentions in verbal behaviour as regards young infants. They explore an emerging and very important element of linguistic communication — one that could well be unique in the animal kingdom.
Keywords
Infants, communication, communicative intent, information transmission, languagesyntax, eye tracking
