Modified items

Research characterises the child as an active learner, who attends more to and selectively retains information they actively elicit better than information they passively receive. At the same time, children learn best from knowledgeable others who tailor information to children’s learning progress. Bringing these disparate findings together requires examining children’s active learning in social interactions. The current study examines whether the active learning advantage persists in social interactions with others and is influenced by the pedagogical status of their social partner (mother, father or friend). We tested 4- to 5-year-old children with their social partners (Nfriend = 47, Nmother = 44, Nfather = 53) during a word learning task using a novel setup where two participants can interact with visual objects on a transparent touchscreen while observing each other. Participants could either actively choose objects to hear their labels or passively observe their partner's choices. Early in the task, there was an overall active benefit, although this pattern appeared to be predominantly driven by interactions between peers. Later in the task, learning appeared to be dynamic and more influenced by the social partner with whom the child was interacting, especially when considering interactions with their peers and their fathers. Together, these findings underscore the temporal and social dynamics of an active learning benefit in children's social interactions.

The current study explored the dynamics of parent-child coordinated attention to novel and familiar objects during a play session, to examine whether parents or children are more likely to lead instances of coordinated joint attention to novel or familiar objects, and how children learn from periods of child-led or parent-led joint attention. Particularly, we investigated whether (i) parents or children lead more instances of joint attention when playing with novel relative to familiar objects, (ii) parents preferentially label novel relative to familiar objects, and (iii) children's learning of novel word-object associations is affected by object labelling frequency and children's sustained attention towards the objects. We found that not only do children lead more instances of joint attention, but, relative to their caregivers, children lead more instances of joint attention to familiar objects relative to novel objects. Parents also appeared to follow their child’s attention and labelled familiar objects more often than novel objects. Furthermore, we found no evidence for children’s recognition of the novel word-object associations. Our findings highlight the contingent nature of social interactions between caregivers and infants, with children leading and parents following their child’s lead, especially with regard to more familiar objects in the child’s environment.

Synthesized speech technology holds potential for enabling natural conversations between humans and machines, particularly in social robotics. However, the combination of synthesized speech with social robots still lacks some qualities of natural speech, which is crucial for human robot interactions, especially for children. In this study, we recorded the neural activity of 5-year-old, typically developing children from middle to high socio-economic households using EEG while they listened to stories narrated by either an adult or a social robot, specifically Furhat. We measured cortical speech tracking to compare how well children's brains tracked synthesized speech from a robot compared to natural speech from an adult. Our results suggest that children do indeed show cortical speech tracking in both scenarios. The results also suggest that cortical speech tracking requires larger time delays between the speech and the response to reach its peak in child-robot interaction compared to child-adult interaction. Possible sources of these differences along with their implications are discussed.

While previous studies highlight the role that children’s interest in natural categories predict their learning of new label-object associations in these categories, the long-term implications of such a relationship – the extent to which children’s interest shape lexical development – remain unclear. The current study examines whether children’s interests in different natural object categories predict their subsequent interest and the number of words children know in those categories six months later. Using data from sixty-seven children tested at eighteen and twenty-four months of age, we found that parents’ estimates of interest in natural object categories at 18-months predicted their reports of their child’s interests at 24-months. Parent interest reports at 18-months also predicted the number of words that children are reported to know in that category at 24-months. Taken together, this study documents the longitudinal relationship between children’s interests, parents’ awareness of their children’s interests and later vocabulary development.