Within arms reach: Physical proximity shapes mother-infant language exchanges in real-time

Sitting and caregiver speech input in typically developing infants and infants with cerebral palsy

The development of independent sitting is associated with language development, but the learning experiences underlying this relationship are not well understood. Additionally, it is unknown how these processes play out in infants with motor impairments and delays in sitting development. We examined the real-time associations between sitting and caregiver speech input in 28 5-7-month-old infants with typical development and 22 7-16-month-old infants with cerebral palsy who were at a similar stage of early sitting development. We hypothesized that object labels would be more likely to co-occur with moments of optimal attention to the labeled object while sitting than while in other positions. Infants were video recorded in five minutes of free play with a caregiver. Coders transcribed caregivers' speech, identified instances of object labeling, and coded infants' and caregivers' attentional states during object labeling episodes. We found that caregivers labeled more objects while infants were sitting than while they were in other positions. However, object labels were not more likely to co-occur with infant attention, infant multimodal attention, or coordinated visual attention to the labeled object during sitting. Infants with cerebral palsy were exposed to fewer labels and were less likely to be attending to objects as they were labeled than infants with typical development. Our findings shed light on a possible pathway connecting sitting and language in typical and atypical development.

Bursty, Irregular Speech Input to Children Predicts Vocabulary Size

Children learn language by listening to speech from caregivers around them. However, the type and quantity of speech input that children are exposed to change throughout early childhood in ways that are poorly understood due to the small samples (few participants, limited hours of observation) typically available in developmental psychology. Here we used child-centered audio recorders to unobtrusively measure speech input in the home to 292 children (aged 2-7 years), acquiring English in the United States, over 555 distinct days (approximately 8600 total hours of observation, or 29.62 h/child). These large timescales allowed us to compare how different dimensions of child-directed speech input (quantity, burstiness) varied throughout early childhood. We then evaluated the relationship between each dimension of input and children's concurrent receptive vocabulary size. We found that the burstiness of speech input (spikes of words) was a stronger correlate with age than the quantity of speech input. Input burstiness was also a stronger predictor than input quantity for children's vocabulary size: children who heard spiky, more intense bouts of input had larger vocabularies. Overall, these results reaffirm the importance of speech input in the home for children's language development and support exposure-consolidation models of early language development.

From behavioral synchrony to language and beyond

Decades of research on joint attention, coordinated joint engagement, and social contingency identify caregiver-child interaction in infancy as a foundation for language. These patterns of early behavioral synchrony contribute to the structure and connectivity of the brain in the temporoparietal regions typically associated with language skills. Thus, children attune to their communication partner and subsequently build cognitive skills directly relating to comprehension and production of language, literacy skills, and beyond. This has yielded marked interest in measuring this contingent, synchronous social behavior neurally. Neurological measures of early social interactions between caregiver and child have become a hotbed for research. In this paper, we review that research and suggest that these early neural couplings between adults and children lay the foundation for a broader cognitive system that includes attention, problem solving, and executive function skills. This review describes the role of behavioral synchrony in language development, asks what the relationship is between neural synchrony and language growth, and how neural synchrony may play a role in the development of a broader cognitive system founded in a socially-gated brain. We address the known neural correlates of these processes with an emphasis on work that examines the tight temporal contingency between communicative partners during these rich social interactions, with a focus on EEG and fNIRS and brief survey of MRI and MEG.

The development of gait and mobility: Form and function in infant locomotion

The development of locomotion can be described by its form (i.e., gait) and its function (i.e., mobility). Both aspects of locomotion improve with experience. Traditional treatises on infant locomotion focus on form by describing an orderly progression of postural and locomotor milestones en route to characteristic patterns of crawling and walking gait. We provide a traditional treatment of gait by describing developmental antecedents of and improvements in characteristic gait patterns, but we highlight important misconceptions inherent in the notion of "milestones". Most critically, we argue that the prevailing focus on gait and milestones fails to capture the true essence of locomotion-functional mobility to engage with the world. Thus, we also describe the development of mobility, including the use of mobility aids for support and propulsion. We illustrate how infants find individual solutions for mobility and how the ability to move cascades into other domains of development. Finally, we show how an integration of gait and mobility provides insights into the psychological processes that make locomotion functional. This article is categorized under: Psychology > Motor Skill and Performance Psychology > Development and Aging.

Daylong egocentric recordings in small- and large-scale language communities: A practical introduction

Daylong egocentric (i.e., participant-centered) recordings promise an unprecedented view into the experiences that drive early language learning, impacting both assumptions and theories about how learning happens. Thanks to recent advances in technology, collecting long-form audio, photo, and video recordings with child-worn devices is cheaper and more convenient than ever. These recording methods can be similarly deployed across small- and large-scale language communities around the world, opening up enormous possibilities for comparative research on early language development. However, building new high-quality naturalistic corpora is a massive investment of time and money. In this chapter, we provide a practical look into considerations relevant for developing and managing daylong egocentric recording projects: Is it possible to re-use existing data? How much time will manual annotation take? Can automated tools sufficiently tackle the questions at hand? We conclude by outlining two exciting directions for future naturalistic child language research.

Natural behavior in everyday settings

Infant behaviors-walking, vocalizing, playing, interacting with others, and so on-offer an unparalleled window into learning and development. The study of infants requires strategic choices about what to observe, where, when, and how. We argue that loosening study constraints-by allowing infants and caregivers to do whatever they choose, wherever they choose, and with whatever materials they choose-promises to reveal a deep understanding of the everyday data on which learning builds. We show that observations of infants' natural behavior yield unique insights into the nature of visual exploration, object play, posture and locomotion, proximity to caregiver, and communication. Furthermore, we show that by situating the study of behavior in ecologically-valid settings, researchers can gain purchase on the contextual regularities that frame learning. We close by underscoring the value of studies at every point on the research continuum-from cleverly controlled lab-based tasks to fully natural observations in everyday environments. Acceleration in the science of behavior rests on leveraging expertise across disciplines, theoretical positions, and methodological approaches.