Invariance detection within an interactive system: A perceptual gateway to language development.

Abstract

In this article, we hypothesize that invariance detection, a general perceptual phenomenon whereby organisms attend to relatively stable patterns or regularities, is an important means by which infants tune in to various aspects of spoken language. In so doing, we synthesize a substantial body of research on detection of regularities across the domains of speech perception, word segmentation, word-referent mapping, and grammar learning. In addition, we outline our framework for how invariance detection might serve as a perceptual gateway to more sophisticated communication by providing a foundation for subsequent emergent capacities. We test our hypothesis using the domain of word mapping as a case in point, emphasizing its epigenetic nature: Word mapping is rooted in the real-time interactions between the infant and the physical world. The present account offers an alternative to prior theories of early language development and helps to link the field of early language development with more general perceptual processes.

Cross-cultural evidence for multimodal motherese: Asian Indian mothers’ adaptive use of synchronous words and gestures

“…We provide a bi-directional mechanistic explanation that involves the organism and its sociolinguistic environment - the ongoing interaction between infants’ perception and maternal scaffolding (Gogate & Hollich, 2010, 2013; Sullivan & Horrowitz, 1983; Yu, Ballard & Aslin, 2005). In general, caregivers coordinate their use of higher pitch, exaggerated intonation contours, elongated speech and longer pauses between utterances (Cooper, Abraham, Berman, & Statska, 1997; Fernald & Simon, 1984; Kitamura & Burnham, 2003) with simultaneous visual mouth movements (Bahrick & Pickens, 1988; Dodd, 1979; Legerstee, 1990; Meltzoff & Kuhl, 1994), more animated head movements and facial expressions (Smith & Strader, 2014; Walker-Andrews, 1997), and gestures using hands and body (Brand, Baldwin & Ashburn, 2002; Brand & Tapscott, 2007).…”

“…In general, caregivers coordinate their use of higher pitch, exaggerated intonation contours, elongated speech and longer pauses between utterances (Cooper, Abraham, Berman, & Statska, 1997; Fernald & Simon, 1984; Kitamura & Burnham, 2003) with simultaneous visual mouth movements (Bahrick & Pickens, 1988; Dodd, 1979; Legerstee, 1990; Meltzoff & Kuhl, 1994), more animated head movements and facial expressions (Smith & Strader, 2014; Walker-Andrews, 1997), and gestures using hands and body (Brand, Baldwin & Ashburn, 2002; Brand & Tapscott, 2007). This coordinated information is amodal , invariant , and redundant; the same information conveyed to one sense modality is conveyed to another in the form of a common temporal structure, tempo, rhythm, and spatial colocation (see review by Gogate & Hollich, 2010). The intersensory redundancy is highly salient, elicits enhanced neural responses (Hyde, Jones, Flom, & Porter, 2011), and promotes infant perception, learning, and memory (Bahrick, 2010; Bahrick & Lickliter, 2002; 2012; Hollich, Newman, & Jusczyk, 2005; Lewkowicz, 2000).…”

“…The monolingual mothers should use multimodal motherese more often to highlight the greater number of fleeting verb-action relations for their children. These hypotheses if supported would provide cross-cultural evidence for ongoing interaction between maternal naming and children’s lexical-mapping development in a dynamic mother-infant communication system (Gogate & Hollich, 2010; 2013). Our goal was to elucidate this interaction and to assess the culture-specific variations in Indian mothers’ multimodal motherese.…”

The effects of expansions, questions and cloze procedures on children’s conversational skills

“…It is suggested that these features scaffold children's learning by providing an immediate and familiar structure for them to access their linguistic representation. They may then be able to analyse discrepancies between their own linguistic organisation and that of adults, and integrate new linguistic information into the language output and storage system (Nelson, 1989), as well as detect regularities for language mapping (Gogate and Hollich, 2010). These adult utterances may also be perceived by children as a form of pragmatically appropriate response and further motivate them to take the next turn and stay engaged in the conversation (Užgiris, Broome, and Kruper 1989;Pan, Sokolov, Rollins, and Snow 1991;Clark and Bernicot, 2008), further stimulating adults to match their input to the children's (Bohannon and Bonvillian, 2009) through a dynamic process that keeps the child within their zone of proximal development (Vygotsky, 1978).…”

The pragmatics of word learning

“…conventionally and contrastively) might reveal to the child the utility of adopting certain heuristics when they encounter further new words (e.g. Byers-Heinlein & Werker, 2009;Gogate & Hollich, 2010;Houston-Price, Caloghiris, & Raviglione, 2010;Callanan, this volume). What are children learning when learning a word?…”