How everyday visual experience prepares the way for learning object names

Infants learn their first object names by linking heard names to scenes. A core theoretical problem is how infants select the right referent from cluttered and ambiguous scenes. Here we show how the distributional properties of objects in young infants' visual experiences may help solve this core problem in early word learning. Infant perspective scenes of mealtimes were collected using head cameras worn by 9-month-old infants (147 mealtimes from 8 infants). The frequency distribution of objects was extremely skewed with the most frequent visual objects corresponding to the normatively first learned object names in English.