Publications of Forgács, B.
Electrophysiological investigation of infants’ understanding of understanding. Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience. 2020;43:1-8.
Electrophysiological investigation of infants’ understanding of understanding
Social cognition might play a critical role in language acquisition and comprehension, as mindreading may be necessary to infer the intended meaning of linguistic expressions uttered by communicative partners. In three electrophysiological experiments, we explored the interplay between belief attribution and language comprehension of 14-month-old infants. First, we replicated our earlier finding: infants produced an N400 effect to correctly labelled objects when the labels did not match a communicative partner’s beliefs about the referents. Second, we observed no N400 when we replaced the object with another category member. Third, when we named the objects incorrectly for infants, but congruently with the partner’s false belief, we observed large N400 responses, suggesting that infants retained their own perspective in addition to that of the partner. We thus interpret the observed social N400 effect as a communicational expectancy indicator because it was contingent not on the attribution of false beliefs but on semantic expectations by both the self and the communicative partner. Additional exploratory analyses revealed an early, frontal, positive- going electrophysiological response in all three experiments, which was contingent on infants’ computing the comprehension of the social partner based on attributed beliefs.
Fourteen-month-old infants track the language comprehension of communicative partners. Developmental Science. 2019;22(2):e12751.
Fourteen-month-old infants track the language comprehension of communicative partners
Infants employ sophisticated mechanisms to acquire their first language, including some that rely on taking the perspective of adults as speakers or listeners. When do infants first show awareness of what other people understand? We tested 14-month-old infants in two experiments measuring event-related potentials. In Experiment 1, we established that infants produce the N400 effect, a brain signature of semantic violations, in a live object naming paradigm in the presence of an adult observer. In Experiment 2, we induced false beliefs about the labelled objects in the adult observer to test whether infants keep track of the other person’s comprehension. The results revealed that infants reacted to the semantic incongruity heard by the other as if they encountered it themselves: they exhibited an N400-like response, even though labels were congruous from their perspective. This finding demonstrates that infants track the linguistic understanding of social partners.