This project concerns babies' comprehension of words, exploring how partial knowledge of a word's meaning affects comprehension, and how context is used in comprehension for words at different levels of knowledge. For known, partially known, and unknown target words (e.g., shoe) infants will be shown pictures of the referent in appropriate or inappropriate contexts (e.g., a shoe on a foot or in a bird's nest). The pictures of target objects will be presented with pictures of other objects from the same level of word knowledge. For each pair of pictures, the baby will hear the target word (e.g., `Do you see the shoe?), and looking time for the target and non-target pictures will be measured. Babies should look at the objects labeled by known, partially known, and unknown words differently depending upon the type of context that is present. That is, babies may be able to make use of an appropriate context to aid their comprehension even when the target word is only partially known. However, when objects are presented in an inappropriate context, it is less likely that infants will be able to use the context to access knowledge about the partially known word. Even very early word comprehension in infants may be affected by the appropriateness of the context in which a label is presented. In addition, the utility of the presented context may depend upon an infant's level of knowledge about the word in question. By investigating these possibilities, we will be one step closer to understanding how humans process language and the context in which it occurs.
