Where language meets attention: How contingent interactions promote learning

Spatial language development in preterm and full-term infants: The role of object exploration and parents' spatial input

Infants learn object features and relations among objects by exploring them. Object exploration and parents' verbal input related to these spatial characteristics may lead to cascades for the development of spatial language. This longitudinal study examined whether infant object exploration and parents' spatial input at Time 1 (Mage = 13.7 months) predicted spatial language of preterm infants (mean gestational age = 30 weeks) and full-term infants (mean gestational age = 38.9 weeks) at Time 2 (Mage = 26 months). The object exploration and parents' spatial input at Time 1 were coded from the semi-structured free play sessions, and infant spatial language was assessed via a parental report at Time 2. Our results showed no differences between preterm and full-term groups on object exploration. However, parents' spatial input differed based on neonatal condition, in which preterm infants received less input than full-term infants. Parents' spatial input co-occurred with 44% of the object exploration events, with a significant difference between groups (preterm: M = 36.1%; full-term: M = 52.1%). Importantly, the interaction between object exploration and parents' spatial input at Time 1 predicted children's spatial language knowledge at Time 2 regardless of children's neonatal status. Infants who explored objects for longer periods and received greater spatial input from their parents at Time 1 knew more spatial words at Time 2 than infants who explored objects less and received less input at Time 1. These findings suggest that early object exploration and parents' spatial input together can lead to a cascading effect on later spatial language development for both preterm and full-term infants.

A quarter century of research on infant contingency learning: Current and future directions

Although traditional learning paradigms provided a substantial base for the emergence of the field of infant studies from the 1960s through the 1990s, research on contingency (operant) learning in infancy has not attracted much attention over the last 25 years. While the reasons for such neglect are unclear, learning protocols offer valuable contributions to the field of infant studies, spanning basic research, translational work, and application. An examination of the literature over the last quarter century shows operant learning concepts in use with respect to the development of agency, goal blockage reactivity, clinical cross-group comparisons, and developmental interventions. Building upon the foundation that infants are capable of contingency learning, research has explored underlying mechanisms, including coordinated movement dynamics and psychobiological correlates. Methodological innovations-such as novel paradigms and cutting-edge techniques like motion capture, eye-tracking, and computational modeling-have further refined our understanding of these processes. Efforts have also focused on identifying conditions that promote learning and factors contributing to data loss. An overarching question remains whether infants demonstrate agency during contingency learning. Additionally, recent research has shifted from a primarily experimental group approach to considering individual differences in early learning. However, it is unclear whether traditional learning metrics effectively capture nonmonotonic behavioral change and variability in learning patterns. The review offers cogent rationales for reintegrating these paradigms into the field of infant studies, discusses gaps in the literature that should be addressed for this goal to be realized, and proposes future directions for advancing the field.

Infant Achievements Intervention Improves Caregiver Implementation Fidelity and Infant Social Communication Outcomes: A Preliminary Randomized Clinical Trial

Randomized controlled trials (RCTs) focused on idiopathic social communication delay (SCD) in the first year of life are rare. We preliminarily tested the efficacy of an 8-week caregiver-implemented intervention for infants with idiopathic SCD. Infants (8-12 months) with SCD were block-randomized with caregivers to the Infant Achievements (IA) (n = 18) or Caregiver Education (CE) (n = 20) group in this assessor-masked RCT. Assessments were completed at baseline, post-intervention, and 8-week follow-up. IA caregivers received reflective, home-based coaching to implement naturalistic developmental behavioral intervention (NDBI) strategies.

PRIMARY OUTCOMES

masked ratings of caregiver implementation fidelity, frequency of infant initiation of joint attention (IJA), and percent of coordination of joint engagement (CJE).

SECONDARY OUTCOMES

masked researcher-administered and scored Mullen Scales of Early Learning (MSEL) language and Visual Reception scaled scores; nonmasked caregiver-reported Communication and Symbolic Behavior Scales Caregiver Questionnaire (CSBS CQ) Social, Speech, and Symbolic composite scores and McArthur-Bates Communication Development Inventories Words Understood and Produced scores. Prespecified analyses followed an intent-to-treat approach using Generalized Linear Mixed Models for non-normally distributed outcomes and linear mixed-effects models for those with normal distributions. Significant group by time effects favored the IA group relative to the CE group on all primary outcomes at post-intervention (p's ≤ 0.001), and for caregiver fidelity and IJA, at follow-up (≤ 0.03). Significant IA intervention effects were detected on secondary outcomes of nonverbal cognition (MSEL Visual Reception) and CSBS CQ Speech composite at post-intervention (< 0.01) and follow-up (≤ 0.02). IA equips caregivers to learn and generalize the implementation of child-responsive NDBI strategies and propels pre-linguistic social communication advances in SCD infants.

TRIAL REGISTRATION

ClinicalTrials.gov identifier: NCT03404505.

Mother-Infant Face-to-Face Interactions Serve a Similar Function in Humans and Other Apes

In humans, mothers and infants often engage in face-to-face interactions, which are often considered crucial for the social transmission of information and the typical social and cognitive development of infants. In this study, we used a comparative developmental perspective to provide an assessment of mother-infant face-to-face interactions in several great and small ape species and to better understand which aspects of face-to-face interactions are shared by humans with other species. We conducted longitudinal behavioral observations on 48 mother-infant pairs from five different genera (i.e., Hylobates: N = 9; Homo: N = 10; Nomascus: N = 6; Pan: N = 18; Symphalangus: N = 5), when infants were 1, 6, and 12 months old. Generalized linear mixed models revealed differences across ape genera and through development in the probability that mothers and infants engaged in face-to-face interactions during the first year of the offsprings' life. As predicted, these interactions were more likely when mothers and infants spent less time in physical contact, in communities usually characterized by more distal parenting styles (i.e., WEIRD humans), and when infants became older and thus motorically more independent. Overall, our findings suggest that face-to-face interactions were likely present in the common ancestor of humans and small apes, and likely serve a similar function across ape species.

Observation of cortical state-based learning in infants in a functional near-infrared spectroscopy paradigm

Significance

Learning can be context-dependent, with better outcomes under some circumstances than others. Adult functional magnetic resonance imaging studies have shown that learning outcomes vary as a function of participants' brain states-patterns of intrinsic neural activity-prior to the learning task. Whether this is also the case in young infants is currently unknown. We report the first functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) study that shows prior brain state-dependent learning in a language task in 6.5-month-old infants. Babies whose functional connectivity was lower in the right hemisphere, but not in the left, during a 2-min period prior to the task learned better a grammatical regularity in an artificial grammar learning task.

Aim

Adult neuroimaging studies have shown that variability in brain states immediately before specific learning tasks is correlated with variability in learning outcomes. Whether the developing infant brain also shows similar state-based learning is currently unknown.

Approach

We have explored whether 6.5-month-old infants' ability to learn artificial grammar was related to their brain state during a 2-min baseline period of rest prior to the grammar task. We have asked if functional connectivity, a global metric of the cortical brain state, as measured by fNIRS, is correlated with learning a non-adjacent regularity in the artificial grammar task.

Results

We have found that the overall level of functional connectivity in the 2-min period immediately prior to the learning experience is negatively correlated with the fNIRS measure of learning in the right hemisphere but not in the left.

Conclusions

We show for the first time that the cortical state of an infant immediately prior to a learning experience determines how well that infant learns and that this can account for some of the variability in learning outcomes.

Individual Differences in Infants' Speech Segmentation Performance: The Role of Mother-Infant Cardiac Synchrony

Caregiver-infant coregulation is an early form of communication. This study investigated whether mother-infant biological coregulation is associated with 9-month-olds' word segmentation performance, a crucial milestone predicting language development. We hypothesized that coregulation would relate with infants' word segmentation performance. Additionally, we examined whether this relationship is influenced by the caregiving environment (i.e., parental reflective functioning) and the infant's emotional state (i.e., positive affect). Coregulation was investigated via cardiac synchrony in 28 nine-month-old infants (16 females) during a 5-min free-play with their German-speaking mothers. Cardiac synchrony was measured through Respiratory Sinus Arrhythmia (RSA), employing Recurrence Quantification Analysis to evaluate dyadic coupling (i.e., Recurrence Rate) and dyadic predictability (i.e., Entropy). Infants' word segmentation was measured with an eye-tracking central-fixation procedure. A stepwise regression revealed that higher dyadic coupling, but not predictability, of the dyads' RSA was associated with infants looking longer toward the screen when listening to novel as compared to familiar test words, indicating advanced word segmentation performance (Cohen's d = 0.25). Moreover, cardiac synchrony correlated positively with maternal sensitivity to their infant's mental states, but not with the infant's positive affect. These results suggest that caregiver-infant biological coregulation may play a foundational role in language acquisition.

Developmental Relationships Between Early Vocabulary Acquisition, Joint Attention and Parental Supportive Behaviors

In late infancy and early toddlerhood, joint attention ability is widely recognized as a crucial foundation for children's vocabulary development, though the exact nature of its contribution remains debated. This study investigates associations between joint attention and subsequent vocabulary development, as well as the possible moderating role of supportive parental behaviors. Seventy children and their families participated in this longitudinal study, which began when the children were 10 months of age. Parents completed the Swedish Communicative Development Inventory (CDI) at four age points (10, 12, 18, and 24 months) to assess receptive and expressive vocabulary growth. Children participated in lab-based assessment of joint attention abilities at 10, 12, and 18 months. Additionally, at 10 and 12 months, parent-child dyads participated in two semi-structured lab assessments to evaluate the quality of parental supportive behaviors during interactions with their child. Primary analysis showed no significant effects of joint attention on subsequent receptive and expressive vocabulary. However, a significant interaction was found between a child's ability to respond to joint attention cues and parental supportive behaviors on receptive vocabulary. These findings indicate that parental supportive behaviors play a crucial role in promoting the development of children's receptive vocabulary.

Contingency enables the formation of social expectations about an artificial agent

What environmental regularities support infant communicative learning from social interactions? We propose that infants allocate their attention toward and learn from external events that are contingent on their own behaviors. We tested the robustness of the influence of contingency on communicative learning by using a non-biological stimulus, a remote-controlled car, as the social partner. The car approached infants and produced a speech sound either contingently to infants' vocalizations or on a yoked schedule. Two additional groups had an unfamiliar human experimenter as their social partner in contingent and yoked control conditions. We assessed whether infants formed expectations about their partner's responsiveness to their vocalizations. Expectations made based on contingent responsiveness would support the role of contingency in promoting plasticity in early communicative learning. Infants across all conditions increased their vocalization rates when their partner paused in responding, suggesting that they expected their vocalizations to influence their partners' behavior. Infants vocalized significantly more to the social partner than their caregiver if they received contingent rather than yoked responses from the social partner, regardless of if the partner was a human or non-biological agent. Contingent responses to prelinguistic vocalizations facilitated the formation of expectations for interactivity of social partners.

On the Broader Significance of Maternal Sensitivity: Mothers' Early and Later Sensitive Parenting Matter to Children's Language, Executive Function, Academics, and Self-Reliance

Researchers have demonstrated the important contribution of mothers' sensitive parenting to children's developing cognition over the first 5 years of life, yet studies examining sensitivity beyond the early years, controlling for earlier effects, are limited. In this exploratory study, we examined the developmental pathways through which mothers' early and later sensitive parenting transacted with children's language, executive function, academics, and self-reliance to predict child outcomes from infancy to adolescence. To a national longitudinal dataset (n = 1364; 52% male; 80% white), we applied random intercept cross-lagged panel modeling to examine between-person and within-person associations for maternal sensitivity and child outcomes. Our findings show that over the first 15 years of life relations between maternal sensitivity and these child outcomes are best characterized by stable, trait-like associations that persist over time with limited state-like time-varying associations. Importantly, we found that maternal sensitivity at both early and later developmental stages is associated with these between-person differences. Given the nature of these associations over four developmental stages, we extend prior research by demonstrating that mothers' sensitivity is enduring because of its consistency both early and later in development.

Getting to the Point: Examining Associations Between Adult Interactional Strategies and Infant Gestures

The developmental importance of infant gesture use is well established, yet few investigations examine what adults can do to facilitate infant gestures. We used an event lag with pauses sequential analysis to generate an index of association between each adult interactional strategy and deictic infant gesture during ten-minute play interactions with 27 typically developing infants (11-25 months) and trained interventionists. We ran correlations to examine potential relationships between the sequential associations, child age, and language scores. Results indicated modeling gestures with a short phrase increased the momentary likelihood of infant gestures overall and points specifically, whereas modeling short phrases without gestures decreased the momentary likelihood of any infant gesture.

An early parenting intervention focused on enriched parent-child interactions improves effortful control in the early years of school

This study examined long-term mediating effects of the smalltalk parenting intervention on children's effortful control at school age (7.5 years; 2016-2018). In 2010-2012, parents (96% female) of toddlers (N = 1201; aged 12-36 months; 52% female) were randomly assigned to either: standard playgroup, smalltalk playgroup (group-only), or smalltalk playgroup with additional home coaching (smalltalk plus). Multi-informant data indicated that smalltalk plus had unique indirect effects on children's effortful control, through parents' capacity to 'maintain and extend' children's focus during joint interactions. Possible mediating pathways via parent verbal responsivity, home learning activities, and descriptive language use were not supported. When parents received a structured playgroup program with additional home coaching, sustainable benefits were evident in children's self-regulation, assessed in the early school years.

The role of focused attention in learning from early childhood to late adolescence: Implications of neonatal brainstem compromise following preterm birth

This comprehensive longitudinal study explored for the first time the interrelations between neonatal brainstem abnormalities, focused attention (FA), and learning-following a preterm cohort (N = 175; 46.3% female; predominantly White) from birth (2003-2006) to 17 years. The findings indicated that FA during early childhood was associated with language outcomes in toddlerhood (n = 131) and academic and attention self-report indices in late adolescence (n = 44). Pilot assessments indicated that FA at 17 years (n = 25) was also associated with concurrent academic and attention functioning. Structural equation modeling analyses revealed that neonatal brainstem functioning, manifested in auditory brainstem response patterns, was associated with early-life FA competence, which affected learning development. Implications underscore the essential role of early brainstem function and FA in shaping childhood learning trajectories.

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.

Of Mouses and Mans: A Test of Errorless Versus Error-Based Learning in Children

For both adults and children, learning from one's mistakes (error-based learning) has been shown to be advantageous over avoiding errors altogether (errorless learning) in pedagogical settings. However, it remains unclear whether this advantage carries over to nonpedagogical settings in children, who mostly learn language in such settings. Using irregular plurals (e.g., "mice") as a test case, we conducted a corpus analysis (N = 227) and two preregistered experiments (N = 56, N = 99), to investigate the potency of error-based learning as a mechanism for language acquisition in 3- and 4-year-old children. The results of the corpus analysis showed that incidental feedback after errors, in the form of caregivers' reformulations of children's errors, was relatively infrequent, had modest informational value, and was rarely used by children to correct their errors immediately. The following two experiments contrasted error-based learning with errorless learning, where the correct utterance was modeled for the child before a potential error was committed. The results showed that error-based learning was not always effective, and when it was, it was certainly not superior to errorless learning. Collectively, these findings question the extension of the benefits of error-based learning from pedagogical to nonpedagogical settings and define constraints under which one mechanism may be more beneficial to learning than the other.

The intersection of parent questions, child skills, and activity context in informal science, technology, engineering, and math learning

Adult verbal input occurs frequently during parent-child interactions. However, few studies have considered how parent language varies across informal STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) activities. In this study, we examined how open and closed parent questions (a) differed across three STEM activities and (b) related to math, science, and vocabulary knowledge in their preschool-aged children. A total of 173 parents and their preschool children (Mage = 4 years) from lower socioeconomic households were video-recorded participating in three STEM-related activities: (a) a pretend grocery store activity, (b) a bridge-building challenge, and (c) a book read about a science topic. Parent questions were categorized as open or closed according to the presence of key question terms. Results indicate that the three activities elicited different frequencies of parent open and closed questions, with the grocery store activity containing the most open and closed questions. Children's science knowledge was predicted by the frequency and proportion of parent open questions during the book read. These results enhance our understanding of the role of parent questions in young children's language environments in different informal learning contexts.

Wanting to matter and learning to care: A neurodevelopmental window of opportunity for (Pro) social learning?

Wanting to matter-to feel socially recognized, appreciated, and capable of actions that benefit others-represents a fundamental motivation in human development. The motivational salience of mattering appears to increase in adolescence. Evidence suggests this is related to pubertal increases in the incentive salience for gaining social value and personal agency. This can provide a useful heuristic for understanding motivational proclivities (i.e. wanting to matter) that influence action-outcome learning as young adolescents are exploring and learning how to navigate increasingly complex social and relational environments. Adolescence also brings new capacities, motives, and opportunities for learning to care about and contribute to the benefit of others. Together, these create a window of opportunity: a sensitive period for learning to gain salient feelings of mattering through caring prosocial actions and valued societal contributions. Successfully discovering ways of mattering by doing things that matter to others may contribute to formative socio-emotional learning about self/other. Advances in understanding these social and relational learning processes and their neurodevelopmental underpinnings can inform strategies to improve developmental trajectories of social competence and wellbeing among adolescents growing up in a rapidly changing and increasingly techno-centric world.

Math talk by mothers, fathers, and toddlers: Differences across materials and associations with children's math understanding

Learning words for numbers, shapes, spatial relations, and magnitudes-"math talk"-relies on input from caregivers. Language interactions between caregivers and children are situated in activity contexts and likely affected by available materials. Here, we examined how play materials influence the math talk directed to and produced by young children. We video-recorded parents (mothers and fathers; English- and/or Spanish-speaking) and their 24- to 36-month-olds during play with four sets of materials, transcribed and coded types of parent and toddler math words/phrases, and assessed toddlers' understanding of number, shape, and spatial relations terms. Categories of math words varied by materials. Numeracy talk (e.g., "one," "two," "first," "second") was more frequent during interactions with a picture book and toy grocery shopping set than with a shape sorter or magnet board; the reverse held for spatial talk (e.g., "out," "bottom," "up," "circle"). Parent math talk predicted toddler math talk, and both parent and toddler math talk predicted toddlers' understanding of spatial and number words. Different materials provide unique opportunities for toddlers to learn abstract math words during interactions with caregivers, and such interactions support early math cognition.

Leader-follower dynamics during early social interactions matter for infant word learning

We know little about the mechanisms through which leader-follower dynamics during dyadic play shape infants' language acquisition. We hypothesized that infants' decisions to visually explore a specific object signal focal increases in endogenous attention, and that when caregivers respond to these proactive behaviors by naming the object it boosts infants' word learning. To examine this, we invited caregivers and their 14-mo-old infants to play with novel objects, before testing infants' retention of the novel object-label mappings. Meanwhile, their electroencephalograms were recorded. Results showed that infants' proactive looks toward an object during play associated with greater neural signatures of endogenous attention. Furthermore, when caregivers named objects during these episodes, infants showed greater word learning, but only when caregivers also joined their focus of attention. Our findings support the idea that infants' proactive visual explorations guide their acquisition of a lexicon.

Toddlers' prior social experience with speakers influences their word learning

Toddlers prefer to learn from familiar adults, particularly their caregivers, and perform better on word learning tasks when taught by caregivers than by strangers. However, it remains unclear why toddlers learn better from caregivers than from strangers. One possibility is that toddlers are more receptive to learning from individuals whom they have found to be engaging in previous interactions. The current study tested whether toddlers learn more from an unfamiliar adult who was previously engaging than from an unfamiliar adult who was previously unengaging. Toddlers (27-29 months, N = 40) were taught labels for novel objects by two different experimenters. Prior to word learning, toddlers watched pre-recorded videos of one experimenter utilizing engaging behaviors (i.e., using infant-directed speech, gestures, eye contact, and positive affect) and one experimenter utilizing unengaging behaviors (i.e., using adult-directed speech, no gestures, no eye contact, and neutral affect). Both experimenters were equally engaging during labeling. Word learning was then tested using a looking-while-listening paradigm. The results of linear mixed-effects model, cluster-based permutation, and growth curve analyses suggest heightened performance for words that were taught by the experimenter who was previously engaging. These results begin to reveal the kinds of social experiences that promote success in early word learning.

How does social contingency facilitate vocabulary development?

Previous research shows that infants of parents who are more likely to engage in socially contingent interactions with them tend to have larger vocabularies. An open question is how social contingency facilitates vocabulary growth. One possibility is that parents who speak in response to their infants more often produce larger amount of language input, which accelerates vocabulary growth. Another possibility is that the simplicity of contingent language input is especially suitable to support early word learning. A third possibility is that more evidence of the communicative nature of language, achieved through frequent contingent responses, helps infants build a link between their own words or vocalizations and others' behaviors. This link may lead to a better understanding of the communicative nature of language and further language advances, including vocabulary growth. To distinguish between these hypotheses, we analyzed the relations between parent-infant interactions when infants were 9 months and their vocabulary size at 12 months, using a naturalistic corpus. Our findings show that the frequency of parents' verbal contingent responses predicts receptive vocabulary size at 12 months and this predictive relation is unlikely to be due to the amount of language input or the simplicity of language within socially contingent interactions. RESEARCH HIGHLIGHTS: Infants of parents who respond to their vocalizations more often during the first year of life tend to have larger vocabularies in the second year. It is an open question what drives the predictive relation between parents' responsiveness and infants' vocabulary; we tested three hypotheses that offer competing explanations. More responsive parents might provide (1) more language input, (2) simpler language input, (3) more evidence of the communicative nature of language (via frequent responses). We find support for the third hypothesis; the frequency of parents' responses predicts infants' vocabularies above and beyond the amount and simplicity of language input.

Infant Communication Across the Transition to Walking: Developmental Cascades Among Infant Siblings of Children with Autism

New motor skills can shape how infants communicate with their caregivers. For example, learning to walk allows infants to move faster and farther than they previously could, in turn allowing them to approach their caregivers more frequently to gesture or vocalize. Does the link between walking and communication differ for infants later diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), whose communicative and motor development differs from their neurotypically developing peers? We prospectively followed two groups of infants longitudinally during the transition from crawling to walking: (1) N = 25 infants with no family history of ASD; and (2) N = 91 infants with an older sibling with ASD. Fifteen infants were later diagnosed with ASD, and 26 infants showed a language delay (but did not receive an ASD diagnosis). After learning to walk, infants without ASD or language delay showed considerable changes in their communication: They gestured more frequently, and increasingly coordinated their gestures and vocalizations with locomotion (e.g., by approaching a caregiver and showing a toy). Infants with language delay showed similar but attenuated growth in their communication. However, infants later diagnosed with ASD did not display enhanced communication after they began to walk.

Trajectories of brain and behaviour development in the womb, at birth and through infancy

Birth is often seen as the starting point for studying effects of the environment on human development, with much research focused on the capacities of young infants. However, recent imaging advances have revealed that the complex behaviours of the fetus and the uterine environment exert influence. Birth is now viewed as a punctuate event along a developmental pathway of increasing autonomy of the child from their mother. Here we highlight (1) increasing physiological autonomy and perceptual sensitivity in the fetus, (2) physiological and neurochemical processes associated with birth that influence future behaviour, (3) the recalibration of motor and sensory systems in the newborn to adapt to the world outside the womb and (4) the effect of the prenatal environment on later infant behaviours and brain function. Taken together, these lines of evidence move us beyond nature-nurture issues to a developmental human lifespan view beginning within the womb.

Caregiver reactions to babbling organize turn-taking interactions: Facilitative effects of vocal versus non-vocal responses

Turn-taking interactions are foundational to the development of social, communicative, and cognitive skills. In infants, vocal turn-taking experience is predictive of infants' socioemotional and language development. However, different forms of turn-taking interactions may have different effects on infant vocalizing. It is presently unknown how caregiver vocal, non-vocal and multimodal responses to infant vocalizations compare in extending caregiver-infant vocal turn-taking bouts. In bouts that begin with an infant vocalization, responses that maintain versus change the communicative modality may differentially affect the likelihood of further infant vocalizing. No studies have examined how caregiver response modalities that either matched or differed from the infant acoustic (vocal) modality might affect the temporal structure of vocal turn-taking beyond the initial serve-and-return exchanges. We video-recorded free-play sessions of 51 caregivers with their 9-month-old infants. Caregivers responded to babbling most often with vocalizations. In turn, caregiver vocal responses were significantly more likely to elicit subsequent infant babbling. Bouts following an initial caregiver vocal response contained significantly more turns than those following a non-vocal or multimodal response. Thus prelinguistic turn-taking is sensitive to the modality of caregivers' responses. Future research should investigate if such sensitivity is grounded in attentional constraints, which may influence the structure of turn-taking interactions.

Verbal Responsiveness in Parents of Toddlers With and Without Autism During a Home Observation

This study examined patterns of verbal responsiveness in parents of toddlers (Mage = 20 months) later identified with autism (n = 121), developmental delay (n = 46), or typical development (n = 44) during an hourlong home observation. Parent verbal responsiveness (PVR) was compared using MANOVA across groups and by child expressive language phase. Multiple regression analyses controlling for child age and maternal education were employed to examine the extent to which PVR predicted variance in concurrent child social communication and prospective language skills. Parents provided synchronous responses approximately 90% of the time. Parents of children with autism and developmental delay used smaller proportions of responses that added linguistic information (i.e., expansions and follow-in directives for language) than those of children with typical development. Parents of children in the preverbal phase were more likely, on average, to affirm their children's acts of intentional communication or provide a follow-in directive for action that did not necessitate a verbal response than to expand or elicit language. Regression results indicated that parental use of expansions and follow-in directives for language made significant contributions to child language outcomes. The patterns we observed may reflect parents' attunement to their child's developmental level. Responsiveness to a child's focus of attention is vital in the earlier stages of language learning; however, results point to the potential importance of parental expansions and follow-in directives for promoting language development across groups in this sample. Directions for intervention research targeting PVR and language skills in toddlers with autism and developmental delays are discussed.

Building language learning: Relations between infant attention and social contingency in the first year of life

In Western societies, social contingency, or prompt and meaningful back-and-forth exchanges between infant and caregiver, is a powerful feature of the early language environment. Research suggests that infants with better attentional skills engage in more social contingency during interactions with adults and, in turn, social contingency supports infant attention. This reciprocity is theorized to build infant language skills as the adult capitalizes on and extends the infant's attention during socially contingent interactions. Using data from 104 infants and caregivers, this paper tests reciprocal relations between infant attention and social contingency at 6- and 12-months and the implications for infant vocabulary at 18-months. Infant attentional skills to social (women speaking) and nonsocial (objects dropping) events were assessed, and social contingency was examined during an 8-minute toy play interaction with a caregiver. Child receptive and expressive vocabulary was measured by caregiver-report. Both social and nonsocial attentional skills related to engagement in social contingency during caregiver-infant interaction, though only models that included social attention and social contingency predicted vocabulary. These findings provide empirical evidence for the proposed reciprocal relations between infant attention and social contingency as well as how they relate to later language.

Heart-to-heart: infant heart rate at 3 months is linked to infant-directed speech, mother-infant interaction, and later language outcomes

Introduction

Previous studies underscore the importance of speech input, particularly infant-directed speech (IDS) during one-on-one (1:1) parent-infant interaction, for child language development. We hypothesize that infants' attention to speech input, specifically IDS, supports language acquisition. In infants, attention and orienting responses are associated with heart rate deceleration. We examined whether individual differences in infants' heart rate measured during 1:1 mother-infant interaction is related to speech input and later language development scores in a longitudinal study.

Methods

Using a sample of 31 3-month-olds, we assessed infant heart rate during mother-infant face-to-face interaction in a laboratory setting. Multiple measures of speech input were gathered at 3 months of age during naturally occurring interactions at home using the Language ENvironment Analysis (LENA) system. Language outcome measures were assessed in the same children at 30 months of age using the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventory (CDI).

Results

Two novel findings emerged. First, we found that higher maternal IDS in a 1:1 context at home, as well as more mother-infant conversational turns at home, are associated with a lower heart rate measured during mother-infant social interaction in the laboratory. Second, we found significant associations between infant heart rate during mother-infant interaction in the laboratory at 3 months and prospective language development (CDI scores) at 30 months of age.

Discussion

Considering the current results in conjunction with other converging theoretical and neuroscientific data, we argue that high IDS input in the context of 1:1 social interaction increases infants' attention to speech and that infants' attention to speech in early development fosters their prospective language growth.

Annual Research Review: 'There, the dance is - at the still point of the turning world' - dynamic systems perspectives on coregulation and dysregulation during early development

During development we transition from coregulation (where regulatory processes are shared between child and caregiver) to self-regulation. Most early coregulatory interactions aim to manage fluctuations in the infant's arousal and alertness; but over time, coregulatory processes become progressively elaborated to encompass other functions such as sociocommunicative development, attention and executive control. The fundamental aim of coregulation is to help maintain an optimal 'critical state' between hypo- and hyperactivity. Here, we present a dynamic framework for understanding child-caregiver coregulatory interactions in the context of psychopathology. Early coregulatory processes involve both passive entrainment, through which a child's state entrains to the caregiver's, and active contingent responsiveness, through which the caregiver changes their behaviour in response to behaviours from the child. Similar principles, of interactive but asymmetric contingency, drive joint attention and the maintenance of epistemic states as well as arousal/alertness, emotion regulation and sociocommunicative development. We describe three ways in which active child-caregiver regulation can develop atypically, in conditions such as Autism, ADHD, anxiety and depression. The most well-known of these is insufficient contingent responsiveness, leading to reduced synchrony, which has been shown across a range of modalities in different disorders, and which is the target of most current interventions. We also present evidence that excessive contingent responsiveness and excessive synchrony can develop in some circumstances. And we show that positive feedback interactions can develop, which are contingent but mutually amplificatory child-caregiver interactions that drive the child further from their critical state. We discuss implications of these findings for future intervention research, and directions for future work.

Lexical Alignment is Pervasive Across Contexts in Non-WEIRD Adult-Child Interactions

Lexical alignment, a communication phenomenon where conversational partners adapt their word choices to become more similar, plays an important role in the development of language and social communication skills. While this has been studied extensively in the conversations of preschool-aged children and their parents in Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic (WEIRD) communities, research in other pediatric populations is sparse. This study makes significant expansions on the existing literature by focusing on alignment in naturalistic conversations of school-aged children from a non-WEIRD population across multiple conversational tasks and with different types of adult partners. Typically developing children aged 5 to 8 years (n = 45) engaged in four semi-structured conversations that differed by task (problem-solving vs. play-based) and by partner (parent vs. university student), resulting in a corpus of 180 conversations. Lexical alignment scores were calculated and compared to sham conversations, representing alignment occurring at the level of chance. Both children and adults coordinated their conversational utterances by re-using or aligning each other's word choices. This alignment behavior persisted across conversational tasks and partners, although the degree of alignment was moderated by the conversational context. These findings suggest that lexical alignment is a robust phenomenon in conversations between school-age children and adults. Furthermore, this study extends lexical alignment findings to a non-WEIRD culture, suggesting that alignment may be a coordination strategy employed by adults and children across diverse linguistic and cultural backgrounds.

Parent-infant conversations are differentially associated with the development of preterm- and term-born infants

Preterm birth is a risk factor for language difficulties. To better understand the language development of preterm-born infants, the current study investigated the concurrent associations between parent-infant conversations and the development of 22 preterm-born and 25 term-born infants at 2 years of age. Conversations occurring during mother/father-infant free-play interactions were analyzed to characterize features of parental speech (volubility, speech rate, lexical diversity, and morphosyntactic complexity) and parent-infant exchanges (parent responsiveness, turn-taking, and conversational balance). The infants' language development (receptive communication and expressive communication) and non-language development (cognitive, social-emotional, and executive function) was assessed using standardized measures. Parent-infant conversations were associated with both language and non-language development. This suggests that parent-infant conversations may support language development directly and/or through advancing non-language skills that could promote language learning. The associations between parent-infant conversations and development varied as a function of birth status (preterm or term). This finding may signal the operation of different developmental processes within preterm- and term-born groups. Finally, infant development was differentially associated with mother-infant and father-infant conversations. This may point to the distinct contributions made by mothers and fathers to the development of both preterm- and term-born infants. To optimize language outcomes, these findings indicate that families should be guided to tailor parent-infant conversations to the unique developmental needs and processes of preterm-born infants. Families should also be supported to leverage the distinct developmental contributions of mothers and fathers. Future recommendations are made regarding how to investigate the proposed preterm-term differences in language development processes and the differential developmental contribution of mothers and fathers.

Touch to learn: Multisensory input supports word learning and processing

Infants experience language in rich multisensory environments. For example, they may first be exposed to the word applesauce while touching, tasting, smelling, and seeing applesauce. In three experiments using different methods we asked whether the number of distinct senses linked with the semantic features of objects would impact word recognition and learning. Specifically, in Experiment 1 we asked whether words linked with more multisensory experiences were learned earlier than words linked fewer multisensory experiences. In Experiment 2, we asked whether 2-year-olds' known words linked with more multisensory experiences were better recognized than those linked with fewer. Finally, in Experiment 3, we taught 2-year-olds labels for novel objects that were linked with either just visual or visual and tactile experiences and asked whether this impacted their ability to learn the new label-to-object mappings. Results converge to support an account in which richer multisensory experiences better support word learning. We discuss two pathways through which rich multisensory experiences might support word learning.

Parent Responsivity, Language Input, and the Development of Simple Sentences

This study explored responsive and linguistic parent input features during parent-child interactions and investigated how four input categories related to children's production of diverse, simple sentences. Of primary interest was parent use of responsive, simple declarative input sentences. Responsive and linguistic features of parent input to 20 typically developing toddlers at 1;9 were coded during play in a laboratory playroom, then classified into four input categories: responsive, declarative, responsive declarative, and neither responsive nor simple declarative. The percentage of each input category was related to child sentence diversity at 2;6 using Spearman correlations. Parent use of responsive declarative and declarative utterances were both rare. Responsive input was positively correlated with child sentence diversity, and the neither category was negatively correlated with child sentence diversity. The findings provide new support for the importance of balanced conversational turns. Implications for defining both how input is delivered and its linguistic content are discussed.

Conversation disruptions in early childhood predict executive functioning development: A longitudinal study

Conversational turn-taking is a complex communicative skill that requires both linguistic and executive functioning (EF) skills, including processing input while simultaneously forming and inhibiting responses until one's turn. Adult-child turn-taking predicts children's linguistic, cognitive, and socioemotional development. However, little is understood about how disruptions to temporal contingency in turn-taking, such as interruptions and overlapping speech, relate to cognitive outcomes, and how these relationships may vary across developmental contexts. In a longitudinal sample of 275 socioeconomically diverse mother-child dyads (children 50% male, 65% White), we conducted pre-registered examinations of whether the frequency of dyads' conversational disruption during free play when children were 3 years old related to children's executive functioning (EF; 9 months later), self-regulation skills (18 months later), and externalizing psychopathology in early adolescence (age 10-12 years). Contrary to hypotheses, more conversational disruptions significantly predicted higher inhibition skills, controlling for sex, age, income-to-needs (ITN), and language ability. Results were driven by maternal disruptions of the child's speech, and could not be explained by measures of overall talkativeness or interactiveness. Exploratory analyses revealed that ITN moderated these relationships, such that the positive effect of disruptions on inhibition was strongest for children from lower ITN backgrounds. We discuss how adult-driven "cooperative overlap" may serve as a form of engaged participation that supports cognition and behavior in certain cultural contexts.

Curiosity constructs communicative competence through social feedback loops

One of the most important challenges for a developing infant is learning how best to allocate their attention and forage for information in the midst of a great deal of novel stimulation. We propose that infants of altricial species solve this challenge by learning selectively from events that are contingent on their immature behavior, such as babbling. Such a contingency filter would focus attention and learning on the behavior of social partners, because social behavior reliably fits infants' sensitivity to contingency. In this way a contingent response by a caregiver to an immature behavior becomes a source of learnable information - feedback - to the infant. Social interactions with responsive caregivers afford infants opportunities to explore the impacts of their immature behavior on their environment, which facilitates the development of socially guided learning. Furthermore, contingent interactions are opportunities to make and test predictions about the efficacy of their social behaviors and those of others. In this chapter, we will use prelinguistic vocal learning to exemplify how infants use their developing vocal abilities to elicit learnable information about language from their social partners. Specifically, we review how caregivers' contingent responses to babbling create information that facilitates infant vocal learning and drives the development of communication. Infants play an active role in this process, as their developing predictions about the consequences of their actions serve to further refine their allocation of attention and drive increases in the maturity of their vocal behavior.

Responsiveness in mother-infant social interactions among immigrant and nonmigrant families: Japanese, South Korean, South American, and European American

A culture learning perspective motivated the present study of the acculturation of responsiveness in mother-infant interactions. Several conceptual and analytic features of responsiveness in mother-infant social interactions were examined: Temporal contingency, mean differences in responsiveness among and within dyads, attunement of mother and infant responsiveness withing dyads, and the influence of acculturation on individual responsiveness. Methodologically, acculturation was assessed at group and individual levels in immigrant Japanese, South Korean, and South American dyads in comparison with nonmigrant dyads in their respective cultures of origin (Japan, South Korea, and South America) and their single common culture of destination (United States). In total, 408 mothers and their 5½-month-old infants were observed in the naturalistic setting of the home, and observations were coded for mothers' speech to infant, social play, and encouraging her infant to look at her, and infants' looking at mother and nondistress vocalizations. Odds ratios were then generated for mother and infant responsiveness in four types of social interactions: Mother speaks to infant and infant looks at mother (Mother Speak/Infant Attend), mother plays with infant and infant looks at mother (Mother Play/Infant Attend), mother plays with infant and infant vocalizes (Mother Play/Infant Vocalize), and mother encourages infant to look at her and infant vocalizes (Mother Encourage/Infant Vocalize). Five key findings emerged. Specifically, mother and infant responsiveness in Mother Speak/Infant Attend interactions were temporally contingent in all cultures. Mean differences in responsiveness among cultures emerged, and within dyads infants were more responsive than their mothers in Mother Speak/Infant Attend interactions. Mother and infant responsiveness in Mother Speak/Infant Attend interactions were attuned in all cultures. Responsiveness in Mother Play/Infant Vocalize interactions showed acculturation effects at the individual level. Implications of these findings for understanding the development of responsiveness in social interactions and acculturation in immigrant families are discussed.

Mothers' use of touch across infants' development and its implications for word learning: Evidence from Korean dyadic interactions

Caregivers' touches that occur alongside words and utterances could aid in the detection of word/utterance boundaries and the mapping of word forms to word meanings. We examined changes in caregivers' use of touches with their speech directed to infants using a multimodal cross-sectional corpus of 35 Korean mother-child dyads across three age groups of infants (8, 14, and 27 months). We tested the hypothesis that caregivers' frequency and use of touches with speech change with infants' development. Results revealed that the frequency of word/utterance-touch alignment as well as word + touch co-occurrence is highest in speech addressed to the youngest group of infants. Thus, this study provides support for the hypothesis that caregivers' use of touch during dyadic interactions is sensitive to infants' age in a way similar to caregivers' use of speech alone and could provide cues useful to infants' language learning at critical points in early development.

Language Experience during Infancy Predicts White Matter Myelination at Age 2 Years

Parental input is considered a key predictor of language achievement during the first years of life, yet relatively few studies have assessed the effects of parental language input and parent-infant interactions on early brain development. We examined the relationship between measures of parent and child language, obtained from naturalistic home recordings at child ages 6, 10, 14, 18, and 24 months, and estimates of white matter myelination, derived from quantitative MRI at age 2 years (mean = 26.30 months, SD = 1.62, N = 22). Analysis of the white matter focused on dorsal pathways associated with expressive language development and long-term language ability, namely, the left arcuate fasciculus (AF) and superior longitudinal fasciculus (SLF). Frequency of parent-infant conversational turns (CT) uniquely predicted myelin density estimates in both the AF and SLF. Moreover, the effect of CT remained significant while controlling for total adult speech and child speech-related utterances, suggesting a specific role for interactive language experience, rather than simply speech exposure or production. An exploratory analysis of 18 additional tracts, including the right AF and SLF, indicated a high degree of anatomic specificity. Longitudinal analyses of parent and child language variables indicated an effect of CT as early as 6 months of age, as well as an ongoing effect over infancy. Together, these results link parent-infant conversational turns to white matter myelination at age 2 years, and suggest that early, interactive experiences with language uniquely contribute to the development of white matter associated with long-term language ability.SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT Children's earliest experiences with language are thought to have profound and lasting developmental effects. Recent studies suggest that intervention can increase the quality of parental language input and improve children's learning outcomes. However, important questions remain about the optimal timing of intervention, and the relationship between specific aspects of language experience and brain development. We report that parent-infant turn-taking during home language interactions correlates with myelination of language related white matter pathways through age 2 years. Effects were independent of total speech exposure and infant vocalizations and evident starting at 6 months of age, suggesting that structured language interactions throughout infancy may uniquely support the ongoing development of brain systems critical to long-term language ability.

Infant vocalizations elicit simplified speech in childcare

Infant babbling has an important social function in promoting early language development by attracting caregiver attention and prompting parents' contingent, simplified speech, which is more learnable for infants. Here, we demonstrate that prelinguistic infant vocalizations also create learning opportunities for infants in childcare settings by eliciting simplified and more learnable linguistic information during teacher-infant interactions. We compared the rates and complexity of contingent and non-contingent verbal interactions of 34 childcare teachers during a one-on-one free play interaction with a familiar infant under their care (M = 12.6 months old). As compared to non-contingent utterances, teachers' contingent utterances included fewer unique words, a higher proportion of single-word responses, and a shorter mean length of utterances. Teachers did not change their response length based on infants' syllable type and were equally likely to respond to vowels and consonant-vowel vocalizations. Sources of individual differences in the simplification effect related to infant behaviors and teacher characteristics are discussed. The results parallel previous findings demonstrating the simplification effect in parent-infant interactions. That teachers also show this simplification effect when responding to infant vocalizations suggests the power of infant prelinguistic vocalizations for organizing caregiver attention in various settings to elicit simplified, learnable language.

Learning how to learn from social feedback: The origins of early vocal development

Infants' prelinguistic vocalizations reliably organize vocal turn-taking with social partners, creating opportunities for learning to produce the sound patterns of the ambient language. This social feedback loop supporting early vocal learning is well-documented, but its developmental origins have yet to be addressed. When do infants learn that their non-cry vocalizations influence others? To test developmental changes in infant vocal learning, we assessed the vocalizations of 2- and 5-month-old infants in a still-face interaction with an unfamiliar adult. During the still-face, infants who have learned the social efficacy of vocalizing increase their babbling rate. In addition, to assess the expectations for social responsiveness that infants build from their everyday experience, we recorded caregiver responsiveness to their infants' vocalizations during unstructured play. During the still-face, only 5-month-old infants showed an increase in vocalizing (a vocal extinction burst) indicating that they had learned to expect adult responses to their vocalizations. Caregiver responsiveness predicted the magnitude of the vocal extinction burst for 5-month-olds. Because 5-month-olds show a vocal extinction burst with unfamiliar adults, they must have generalized the social efficacy of their vocalizations beyond their familiar caregiver. Caregiver responsiveness to infant vocalizations during unstructured play was similar for 2- and 5-month-olds. Infants thus learn the social efficacy of their vocalizations between 2 and 5 months of age. During this time, infants build associations between their own non-cry sounds and the reactions of adults, which allows learning of the instrumental value of vocalizing.

Prelinguistic intersubjective and socio-communicative skills in infants with neurodevelopmental disabilities aged 0-36 months: A new assessment and parent support tool

Background

Although children with neurodevelopmental disability (NDD) present with several deficits, they partially share developmental impairments in prelinguistic intersubjective and socio-communicative skills, which are not easily assessed by conventional tests during the first years of life.

Aim

The current paper presents a new procedure to assess the prelinguistic intersubjective and socio-communicative skills of NDD children aged 0-36 months. A specific observation form template, called the Observation of Prelinguistic Intersubjective and Socio-Communicative Skills (OPISCoS) form, has been designed to systematically detect infant skills during daily routines (e.g., mealtime, playtime, desk activities). The OPISCoS form helps speech therapists to provide parents support to better perceive and understand early communicative signals from their children, avoiding the risk of excessive or reduced social stimulation.

Methods

The OPISCoS form is composed of three sections, namely, "Pragmatics and Communication," "Decoding," and "Expression," which are useful to delineate the communication abilities of children with NDD and are not tapped by traditional batteries. Vignettes from clinical practice illustrate and provide exemplifications for using the OPISCoS form with NDD infants and their parents.

Results

The OPISCoS form was reported for two children and showed potential in detecting disrupted communicative behaviors and planning specific early interventions. Further, we observed an improvement not only in children's communicative abilities improve but also in their interactions with parents. From a clinical point of view, the OPISCoS form (1) offers an observational perspective of prelinguistic intersubjective and socio-communicative skills in infants with NDD and (2) may be useful to practitioners to enhance parents' sensitivity to their infants' communicative behavior.

Conclusion

The OPISCoS form was developed in clinical practice and is based on a very preliminary description of a new observational procedure as integration for the assessment of NDD children. The OPISCoS form appears to be a useful tool for the clinical assessment of prelinguistic intersubjective and socio-communicative skills in NDD infants as well as for promoting the quality of early parenting.

Cascades in language acquisition: Re-thinking the linear model of development

The first 5 years of life are characterized by incredible growth across domains of child development. Drawing from over 50 years of seminal research, this chapter contextualizes recent advances in language sciences through the lens of developmental cascades to explore complexities and connections in acquisition. Converging evidence-both classic and contemporary-points to the many ways in which advances in one learning system can pose significant and lasting impacts on the advances in other learning systems. This chapter reviews evidence in developmental literature from multiple domains and disciplines (i.e., cognitive, social, motor, bilingual language learning, and communication sciences and disorders) to examine the phenomenon of developmental cascades in language acquisition.

Developing language in a developing body, revisited: The cascading effects of motor development on the acquisition of language

In the first years of life, infants rapidly acquire a series of new motor skills. They learn to sit independently, to walk with skill, and to engage in a wide variety of interactions with objects. Over these same years, infants also begin to develop language. These are not isolated events. In a complex developing system, even small changes in one domain can have far-reaching effects on development in other domains. This is the fundamental idea behind the rich framework known as the developmental cascades perspective. Here we employ this framework to show how early motor advances can exert downstream effects on the development of language. Focusing first on the emergence of independent sitting, then on the development of walking, and finally on changes in the ways in which infants act on and combine actions on objects, we describe how the nature and quality of infant actions change dramatically over the first few years and how this brings with it new possibilities for engaging the environment, more sophisticated ways of interacting with people, and significant alterations in communications directed by caregivers to the infant and coordinated with infant action in time and in meaning. The developmental cascades framework provides an approach for understanding how advances in motor skills influence communicative and language development, and more generally, for conceptualizing the constant, dynamic, and complex interplay between developing infants and their environments as it unfolds over time. This article is categorized under: Linguistics > Language Acquisition Psychology > Motor Skill and Performance Psychology > Development and Aging.

Influences of infants' and mothers' contingent vocal responsiveness on young infants' vocal social bids in the Still Face Task

Infants' social bids in the still face phase of the Still Face Task demonstrate their emerging sense of self agency as these behaviors happen in the absence of the partner's social overtures. The study examined the role of infants' contingent responsiveness to their mothers in social interactions on their social bidding to the mother when she becomes unresponsive. Social bids are non-distress vocalizations or smiles while looking at the unresponsive partner. Infants and their mothers longitudinally engaged in the Still Face Task when infants were one, two, and three months. At two months, infant non-distress vocalizations and smiles and contingent vocal and smiling responsiveness increased in the initial interactive phase and vocal and smile social bids increased in the still face phase. Infant contingent vocal responsiveness predicted infant vocal social bids but infant contingent smiling responsiveness did not predict infant smile social bids. Infant contingent vocal responsiveness was a stronger predictor than infant non-distress vocalizations per se of infant vocal social bids at two and three months. However, maternal contingent vocal responsiveness was the primary predictor of infant vocal social bids at these ages. Maternal contingent responsiveness to infant behavior allows infants to sense their agency in affecting their mothers' behavior. Yet infants are active participants, becoming contingently responsive to their mothers, which facilitates their awareness that they are effective agents in instigating social interaction, as demonstrated by social bids.

Discourse with Few Words: Coherence Statistics, Parent-Infant Actions on Objects, and Object Names

The data for early object name learning is often conceptualized as a problem of mapping heard names to referents. However, infants do not hear object names as discrete events but rather in extended interactions organized around goal-directed actions on objects. The present study examined the statistical structure of the nonlinguistic events that surround parent naming of objects. Parents and 12-month -old infants were left alone in a room for 10 minutes with 32 objects available for exploration. Parent and infant handling of objects and parent naming of objects were coded. The four measured statistics were from measures used in the study of coherent discourse: (1) a frequency distribution in which actions were frequently directed to a few objects and more rarely to other objects; (2) repeated returns to the high-frequency objects over the 10-minute play period; (3) clustered repetitions, continuity, of actions on objects; and (4) structured networks of transitions among objects in play that connected all the played-with objects. Parent naming was infrequent but related to the statistics of object-directed actions. The implications of the discourse-like stream of actions are discussed in terms of learning mechanisms that could support rapid learning of object names from relatively few name-object co-occurrences.

Infant looking preferences towards dynamic faces: A systematic review

Although the pattern of visual attention towards the region of the eyes is now well-established for infants at an early stage of development, less is known about the extent to which the mouth attracts an infant's attention. Even less is known about the extent to which these specific looking behaviours towards different regions of the talking face (i.e., the eyes or the mouth) may impact on or account for aspects of language development. The aim of the present systematic review is to synthesize and analyse (i) which factors might determine different looking patterns in infants during audio-visual tasks using dynamic faces and (ii) how these patterns have been studied in relation to aspects of the baby's development. Four bibliographic databases were explored, and the records were selected following specified inclusion criteria. The search led to the identification of 19 papers (October 2021). Some studies have tried to clarify the role played by audio-visual support in speech perception and early production based on directly related factors such as the age or language background of the participants, while others have tested the child's competence in terms of linguistic or social skills. Several hypotheses have been advanced to explain the selective attention phenomenon. The results of the selected studies have led to different lines of interpretation. Some suggestions for future research are outlined.

Semantic Contingency of Maternal Verbal Input Directed at Very Preterm and Full-Term Children

Several studies have testified to the importance of a responsive linguistic input for children’s language acquisition and development. In particular, maternal use of expansions, imitations, interpretations, and labels has been shown to promote both children’s language comprehension and production. From this perspective, the present study examined the semantically contingent linguistic input addressed to very preterm children’s comparing it to that directed to full-term children observed during a semi-structured play session when the children were 24 months of age. The relationships between maternal contingent utterances and children’s communicative repertoires were also investigated. The main results showed that mothers of full-term children produced a higher proportion of semantically contingent utterances than those of very preterm children; moreover, this variable was associated with children’s more advanced communicative-linguistic outcomes. Overall, this study supports the interdependence between mothers’ use of certain linguistic strategies and children’s communicative-linguistic repertoire, extending this evidence to children born very preterm and suggesting the importance of considering the semantic contingency aspect of child-directed speech to support the communicative and linguistic development of these children.

A Framework for Understanding the Relation Between Spoken Language Input and Outcomes for Children with Cochlear Implants

Spoken language outcomes after cochlear implantation are highly variable. Some variance can be attributed to individual characteristics. Research with typically hearing children suggests that the amount of language directed to children may also play a role. However, several moderating factors may complicate the association between language input and language outcomes in children with cochlear implants. In this article, I present a conceptual framework that posits that the association between total language input directed to children and language outcomes is moderated by factors that influence what is accessible, attended to, and coordinated with the child. The framework also posits that children with cochlear implants exhibit more variability on those moderating factors, which explains why the relation between language input and language outcomes may be more complex even if language input is more important for successful language outcomes in this population.