Hearing Parents’ Use of Auditory, Visual, and Tactile Cues as a Function of Child Hearing Status

Abstract

Parent-child dyads in which the child is deaf but the parent is hearing present a unique opportunity to examine parents’ use of non-auditory cues, particularly vision and touch, to establish communicative intent. This study examines the multimodal communication patterns of hearing parents during a free play task with their hearing (N=9) or deaf (N=9) children. Specifically, we coded parents’ use of multimodal cues in the service of establishing joint attention with their children. Dyad types were compared for overall use of multimodal – auditory, visual, and tactile – attention-establishing cues, and for the overall number of successful and failed bids by a parent for a child’s attention. The relationship between multimodal behaviors on the part of the parent were tracked for whether they resulted in successful or failed initiation of joint attention. We focus our interpretation of the results on how hearing parents differentially accommodate their hearing and deaf children to engage them in joint attention. Findings can inform the development of recommendations for hearing parents of deaf children who are candidates for cochlear implantation regarding communication strategies to use prior to a child’s implantation. Moreover, these findings expand our understanding of how joint attention is established between parents and their preverbal children, regardless of children’s hearing status.

Revisiting how we operationalize joint attention

“…We have added the multimodality dimension of our coding in light of findings from both social (Baron-Cohen, 1991) and associative (Moore and Corkum, 1994) accounts. More recently, our approach is proving to be consistent with results obtained using eye-tracking (Yu & Smith, 2017a, 2017b, as well as those from observational coding (de Barbaro et al, 2016d), whose findings that infants are particularly responsive to their dyadic partners' hands is something we documented early on in our own coding Depowski et al, 2015;Gabouer, Oghalai, & Bortfeld, 2018. Starting with our initial observation of the importance of the caregiver's hands, we have iteratively fine-tuned our protocol with each data set to better characterize this phenomenon.…”

“…Multimodal cues are a powerful source of information for newborns and young infants in that auditory cues commonly result in visual attention (Kaplan & Werner, 1991;Mendelson et al, 1976). More recent studies support the general idea that multimodal information supports vocabulary development (Trueswell et al, 2016), establishment of category labels (Clark & Estigarribia, 2011), sustained attention (Suarez-Rivera et al, 2019), and joint attention (Gabouer et al, 2018(Gabouer et al, , 2020. By interrogating whether bids that consist of one sensory modality or various combinations of sensory modalities result in more or less joint attention, we can expand our understanding of infant development in general, and the influence of different interaction styles in particular.…”

“…Overall, this suggests infants' exceptional sensitivity to relevant socio-communicative acts performed by the parent. Interestingly, these researchers (Striano & Stahl, 2005) suggested that converging, multimodal cues may also influence the engagement in joint attention, a view that has guided the focus of our own research Depowski et al, 2015;Gabouer et al, 2018Gabouer et al, , 2020, and is a topic that we will return to below.…”

“…Our joint attention coding criteria are based on active engagement with hundreds of hours of parent-child interaction videos Depowski et al, 2015;Gabouer et al, 2018Gabouer et al, , 2020, as well as careful reading of others' research. Our focus has been on how to characterize the factors that lead to joint attention and to do so systematically, with an eye towards establishing a mechanistic account of this phenomenon.…”

“…In an effort to further characterize successful and failed bids for joint attention, we also examine how different sensory modalities are used in these attempts, both alone and in various combinations (i.e., Depowski et al, 2015;Gabouer et al, 2018Gabouer et al, , 2020. By coding and quantifying an initiator's use of multimodal cues, we can further inform a social account of joint attention and move away from a strictly visual interpretation and mechanism.…”