Infants’ Developing Understanding of Social Gaze

Beier, Jonathan S.; Spelke, Elizabeth S.

doi:10.1111/j.1467-8624.2011.01702.x

Cited by 100 publications

(96 citation statements)

References 57 publications

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“…In addition, previous work similarly indicates that gaze-following does not determine the extent to which infants monitor speakers in a conversation (Augusti et al, 2010). Finally, while we did not compare infants' looking to a human addressee with their looking to a nonhuman target, looking time studies suggest that at least by 10 months, if not earlier (Legerstee, Barna, & DiAdamo, 2000), infants expect people to converse with and look at other people, rather than inanimate objects (Beier & Spelke, 2012).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 89%

“…Previous research shows that infants as young as 6 months are sensitive to whether conversational partners are face-to-face in mutual gaze, or back-to-back (Augusti et al, 2010), and at 10 months they also distinguish between these contexts for static, silent images (Beier & Spelke, 2012). The findings from Experiment 1 indicate that at least by 2 years of age, infants also see the face-to-face orientation with mutual gaze as a setting in which speech is likely to provoke a response.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…As mutual gaze between third parties signals affiliation for preschoolers (Nurmsoo, Einav, & Hood, 2012) and adults (Thayer & Schiff, 1974), and speakers typically face their addressees, we expected the body orientation and gaze-direction of the actors to influence infants' expectations. Further, 6-month-olds monitor interlocutors more when they are in mutual than non-mutual gaze (Augusti et al, 2010), and 10-month-olds not only distinguish mutual gaze from non-mutual gaze but also show signs of surprise when an entity that a person looks at and converses with is revealed to be an object, rather than another person (Beier & Spelke, 2012). Studies on infants' understanding of object-directed actions further suggest that gaze direction is a strong cue to goal expectation (Phillips, Wellman, & Spelke, 2002).…”

Section: The Current Studymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Our first hypothesis was that when the two actors faced each other, infants would be more likely to expect a response following speech than non-speech, as this is a typical communicative context. Second, given infants' early sensitivity to third-party mutual gaze (Augusti et al, 2010;Beier & Spelke, 2012), and their ability to use gaze to predict actions (Phillips et al, 2002), we predicted that infants would expect a response from speech only when the Emitter is oriented toward the Recipient. Regarding age, one possibility is that infants' understanding of third-party verbal interactions depends on their own verbal communicative experience (von Hofsten et al, 2009; see also Sommerville, Woodward, & Needham, 2005) and that 12-month-olds -who are only beginning to utter their first words -have not yet developed expectations about third-party speech.…”

Section: The Current Studymentioning

confidence: 99%

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1- and 2-year-olds’ expectations about third-party communicative actions

Thorgrimsson

Fawcett

Liszkowski

2015

Infant Behavior and Development

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a b s t r a c tInfants expect people to direct actions toward objects, and they respond to actions directed to themselves, but do they have expectations about actions directed to third parties? In two experiments, we used eye tracking to investigate 1-and 2-year-olds' expectations about communicative actions addressed to a third party. Experiment 1 presented infants with videos where an adult (the Emitter) either uttered a sentence or produced non-speech sounds. The Emitter was either face-to-face with another adult (the Recipient) or the two were back-to-back. The Recipient did not respond to any of the sounds. We found that 2-, but not 1-year-olds looked quicker and longer at the Recipient following speech than nonspeech, suggesting that they expected her to respond to speech. These effects were specific to the face-to-face context. Experiment 2 presented 1-year-olds with similar face-to-face exchanges but modified to engage infants and minimize task demands. The infants looked quicker to the Recipient following speech than non-speech, suggesting that they expected a response to speech. The study suggests that by 1 year of age infants expect communicative actions to be directed at a third-party listener.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 89%

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: The Current Studymentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: The Current Studymentioning

confidence: 99%

See 2 more Smart Citations

1- and 2-year-olds’ expectations about third-party communicative actions

Thorgrimsson

Fawcett

Liszkowski

2015

Infant Behavior and Development

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Children are also often privy to others' conversations, and can accurately interpret such overheard communicative interactions. For example, infants expect a speaker to speak toward another individual rather than toward inanimate objects (Molina, van de Walle, Condry, & Spelke, 2009), use a speaker's gaze to locate her audience (Beier & Spelke, 2012), and look toward listeners in anticipation of their response to others' speech (Thorgrímsson, Fawcett, & Liszkowski, 2015). Infants also seem to appreciate that speech provides information, expecting a listener to respond appropriately to speech, but not to non-speech vocalizations (e.g., a cough; Martin, Onishi, & Vouloumanos, 2012; see also Cheung, Xiao, & Lai, 2012;Song, Onishi, Baillargeon, & Fisher, 2008;Vouloumanos, Martin, & Onishi, 2014;Vouloumanos, Onishi, & Pogue, 2012).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Children’s Third-Party Understanding of Communicative Interactions in a Foreign Language

Afshordi

Sullivan

Markson

2018

Collabra: Psychology

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Two studies explored young children's understanding of the role of shared language in communication by investigating how monolingual English-speaking children interact with an English speaker, a Spanish speaker, and a bilingual experimenter who spoke both English and Spanish. When the bilingual experimenter spoke in Spanish or English to request objects, four-year-old children, but not three-year-olds, used her language choice to determine whom she addressed (e.g. requests in Spanish were directed to the Spanish speaker). Importantly, children used this cue -language choice -only in a communicative context. The findings suggest that by four years, monolingual children recognize that speaking the same language enables successful communication, even when that language is unfamiliar to them. Three-year-old children's failure to make this distinction suggests that this capacity likely undergoes significant development in early childhood, although other capacities might also be at play.

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Development of Personal and Cultural Identities

Chandler

Dunlop

2015

Handbook of Child Psychology and Developmental Science

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This chapter is about dualisms: dualisms in general, and, more particularly, about those dichotomies of thought that set selves apart from society, and conceptually isolate individuals from their communities. Because these familiar cleavages between persons and collectives can only be understood in the context of centuries’ worth of commitments to substance dualisms more generally, the chapter begins with an introductory detour through earlier crash‐sites of contested claims about the alleged vices and virtues of dualistic thought more generally. It is obviously not enough, however, to simply document and bemoan the isolationist tactics common to most anthropologies, psychologies, and sociologies, as each (with its own unique and nonoverlapping units of analysis) continues to pass one another like proverbial ships in the night. Rather, it is argued, a promising first step out of this doctrinaire dilemma gets its footing by treading on common concepts that already exist at the margins of those paradigms governing such usual disciplinary divides. The concepts of personal and cultural continuity are offered up as provisional examples of such shared constructs, and are enlisted in the service in a post‐Durkheimian account of differential suicide rates in Indigenous and non‐Indigenous cultures.

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Infants’ Developing Understanding of Social Gaze

Cited by 100 publications

References 57 publications

1- and 2-year-olds’ expectations about third-party communicative actions

1- and 2-year-olds’ expectations about third-party communicative actions

Children’s Third-Party Understanding of Communicative Interactions in a Foreign Language

Development of Personal and Cultural Identities

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