Fine‐Grained Analysis of Motionese: Eye Gaze, Object Exchanges, and Action Units in Infant‐Versus Adult‐Directed Action

Abstract

Mothers modify their actions when demonstrating objects to infants versus adults.Such modifications have been called infant-directed action (IDA) or mofionese (Brand, Baldwin, & Ashburn, 2002). We investigated the IDA features of interactiveness and simplification by quantifying eye gaze, object exchanges, and action units enacted between exchanges in 42 mothers' demonstrations of novel objects to infants (6-8 months or 11-13 months) or adults. We found more eye gaze, more object exchanges, and fewer action types per turn in demonstrations to infants relative to adults. Unlike prior research using global measurements, we detected differences in behavior directed at infants of different ages: Shorter, more frequent gazes and more exchanges characterized demonstrations to older versus younger infants. These findings indicate the fruitfulness of fine-grained analysis of IDA, and further clarify how adults may support infants' processing of human motion.Despite the complexities in their everyday social environment, infants make rapid progress in analyzing incoming streams of information. In the action domain, for instance, infants can parse dynamic behavior streams into intention-relevant units by 9 months of age (

Sensorimotor input as a language generalisation tool: a neurorobotics model for generation and generalisation of noun-verb combinations with sensorimotor inputs

“…This setting is similar as the infant-directed action or motionese scenario (e.g. Brand et al 2002;Brand 2007) where the mother modifies their actions when demonstrating objects to infants in order to assist infants' processing of human action. Duplicating the learning environment of the development process, the aim of these experiments was to evaluate the verb-noun generalisation with a large data-set using the MTRNN.…”

Tutoring in adult-child interaction

“…Focusing on the tutor's action presentations, studies have shown that when parents present new actions/objects to their infants (versus to other adults), they carefully adapt both their speech ('motherese') and their actions ('motionese') to the child rendering specific aspects salient (Fernald & Mazzie, 1991;Brand et al, 2002Brand et al, , 2007Gogate et al, 2000). Recent research on 'motionese' has shown that parents perform shorter motions with more pauses for their infants (Rohlfing et al, 2006).…”

“…This opens up interesting parallels to very young infants, such that tutoring in adult-child-interaction has been considered as an empirical model for robotic learning (Rohlfing et al, 2006;Zukow-Goldring, 2006;Zukow-Goldring & Arbib, 2007). When presenting new tasks to their infants, parents carefully modify both their speech ('motherese') and their actions ('motionese') to render specific aspects of the action more salient (Fernald & Mazzie, 1991;Brand et al, 2002Brand et al, , 2007Brand & Shallcross, 2008;Rohlfing et al, 2006). Since this type of tutor conduct could provide input also highly suitable to a robot's observational capabilities, a systematic description of 'motionese' features has been realized (Rohlfing et al, 2006;Vollmer et al, 2009 a,b).…”

Robot feedback shapes the tutor’s presentation

“…as well as their actions ("motionese") to render specific aspects of the presentation more salient (Fernald & Mazzie 1991;Brand et al 2007;Rohlfing et al 2006). Particular "motionese" features have been revealed which indicate that parents make longer pauses between subactions, present the action more slowly ('velocity'/'pace') and with more exaggerated movement ('range') when interacting with their infants as opposed to with other adults ).…”

“…Our analysis revealed that tutors adjust the pauses between their actions, and the speed and height of their motions to the robot's shifting visual focus of attention. These are the central parameters described as "motionese" (Brand et al 2007 features in adult-child-tutoring. (4) Note that the robot can also provoke disturbances in the tutor's performance (e.g.…”