How interest shapes early vocabularies

This presentation, given at the lab meeting of the Language Development Department at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, gives an overview of my PhD project.

Special attention is given to the first of a set of three related eye-tracking studies, which was published as Ackermann, Hepach & Mani (2019) in Developmental Science.

In my PhD project, I look at how individual interest might explain the considerable individual differences we see in early vocabularies. In the first study, we show that word recognition is boosted for words from high-interest categories at 30 months. In the second and third study, we look at the influence of category interest on novel word retention and resolving referential ambiguity, respectively.