ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews the research documenting the role of eye gaze direction in guiding young children's formation of mappings between words and objects. It discusses the intentional versus attentional explanations for the role of gaze direction in word learning. The chapter describes two studies from our lab that have attempted to disentangle the relative contribution of attentional and intentional cues in infants' reliance on gaze cues to learn new words. One interpretation of the findings that infants use gaze direction to establish word-object linkages suggests that infants are attuned to the intentional nature of gaze cues. Nonpredictive, nonreferential gaze cues can trigger an automatic shift of attention in adults, and in children and infants. The chapter demonstrates that while attentional orientation can certainly play a role in word learning, infants' reliance on eye gaze direction cannot simply be reduced to a mechanistic reliance on attention.
