Contingencies Between Infants’ Gaze, Vocal, and Manual Actions and Mothers’ Object-Naming: Longitudinal Changes From 4 to 9 Months

Abstract

Infants' early motor actions help organize social interactions, forming the context of caregiver speech. We investigated changes across the first year in social contingencies between infant gaze and object exploration, and mothers' speech. We recorded mother-infant object play at 4, 6, and 9 months, identifying infants' and mothers' gaze and hand actions, and mothers' object naming and general utterances. Mothers named objects more when infants vocalized, looked at objects or the mother's face, or handled multiple objects. As infants aged, their increasing object exploration created opportunities for caregiver contingencies and changed how gaze and hands accompany object naming over time.

Action prediction during real‐time parent‐infant interactions

“…Our findings also highlight the dynamic nature of the world of the infant. As others before us have shown, we found that infants experience complex, multimodal inputs from their parent's visual and manual activity and their own sensorimotor behaviors (Chang et al, 2016;Franchak et al, 2010). Our findings reveal that infants never experience discrete, unambiguous action events like those typically presented in controlled laboratory paradigms.…”

Infant sustained attention but not joint attention to objects at 9 months predicts vocabulary at 12 and 15 months

“…Considerable evidence indicates that parent–infant social interactions with objects is a complex real‐time dynamic system with each partner's behaviors determining the behaviors of the other (Chang, de Barbaro, & Deák, ; Suanda, Smith, & Yu, ; Yu & Smith, , 2017b). The mature partner may lead, follow, and help infants sustain attention to an object (Yu & Smith, ).…”

The Signal in the Noise: The Visual Ecology of Parents' Object Naming

“…That is, the current study shows how developments in the motor system (including but not limited to developments in fine motor control, hand–eye coordination, posture control) that support mature actions on objects could be critical in creating optimal visual experiences for word learning (see Pereira et al., ; Yu & Smith, ). Other research suggests that advanced manual abilities may create tactile and multi‐modal experiences that are ideal for learning (Chang, de Barbaro, & Deak, ; Suanda, Smith, & Yu, ; Yu & Smith, ). Thus, one pathway by which non‐linguistic processes shape word learning is through the quality of the input.…”