Joint engagement in the home environment is frequent, multimodal, timely, and structured

Suárez-Rivera, Catalina; Schatz, Jacob; Herzberg, Orit; Tamis-LeMonda, Catherine S.

doi:10.1111/infa.12446

Cited by 36 publications

(30 citation statements)

References 68 publications

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“…Presumably, joint engagement supports learning across domains through timely behavioral inputs—gaze, gesture, touch, and language. Indeed, caregivers coordinate multiple behaviors during bouts of joint engagement (Suarez‐Rivera et al., 2022) and such multimodal input directs and sustains infants’ attention more than unimodal input (Deák et al., 2018; Suarez‐Rivera et al., 2019). Moreover, different inputs may yield unique benefits.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Infants’ object interactions are long and complex during everyday joint engagement

Schatz

Suárez-Rivera

Kaplan

et al. 2022

Developmental Science

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As infants interact with the object world, they generate rich information about object properties and functions. Much of infant learning unfolds in the presence of caregivers, who talk about and act on the objects of infant play. Does mother joint engagement correspond to real-time changes in the complexity and duration of infant object interactions? We observed 38 mothers and their first-born infants (cross-sectional, 13, 18, and 23 months) during 2 h of everyday activity as infants freely navigated their home environments. Behavioral coding explored thousands of infant object interactions within and outside mother joint engagement. Object interactions involving exclusively simple play were shorter than complex play bouts. Critically, mothers' multimodal input (i.e., touching/gesturing toward and talking about the focal object) corresponded with more complex and longer play bouts than when mothers provided no input. Bouts involving complex play and multimodal input lasted 7.5 times longer than simple play bouts absent mother input. Moreover, "action-orienting talk" (e.g., "Twist it", "Feed dolly"), rather than talk per se, corresponded with longer bout duration and complexity. Notably, the association between joint engagement and play duration was not a function of mothers having more time to join. Analyses that eliminated short infant bouts and considered the timing of mothers' behaviors confirmed that mother input "extended" the duration of play bouts. As infants actively explore their environments, their object interactions change moment to moment in the presence of mothers' multimodal engagement.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Infants’ object interactions are long and complex during everyday joint engagement

Schatz

Suárez-Rivera

Kaplan

et al. 2022

Developmental Science

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“…Infants who experience referential transparency during naming moments are likely to expand their vocabularies rapidly (Cartmill et al., 2013). Additionally, infants’ own engagement with objects leads to triadic engagement as caregivers jointly engage with the same objects (Suarez‐Rivera, Schatz, Herzberg, & Tamis‐LeMonda, 2022). Of course, sometimes infants may manipulate objects in response to caregiver naming; however, research on contingency and temporal features of mother–infant interactions suggests that mothers tend to follow up on infant actions with labeling utterances (Tamis‐LeMonda, Kuchirko, & Song, 2014).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

From Play to Language: Infants’ Actions on Objects Cascade to Word Learning

2022

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Infants build knowledge by acting on the world. We conducted an ecologically grounded test of an embodied learning hypothesis: that infants’ active engagement with objects in the home environment elicits caregiver naming and cascades to learning object names. Our home‐based study extends laboratory‐based theories to identify real‐world processes that support infant word learning. Frame‐by‐frame coding of 2‐hr video recordings of 32 mothers and their 18‐ to 23‐month‐old infants focused on infant manipulation and mother and infant naming of 245 unique objects. Objects manipulated by infants and/or named by mothers were more likely to appear in infants’ vocabularies and spontaneous speech relative to nonmanipulated objects and objects that mothers did not name. Furthermore, the vocabularies of 5,520 infants hosted on Wordbank revealed an early age of acquisition of words for objects that mothers named and infants manipulated. Infants actively build object–word mappings from everyday engagements with objects in the context of social interactions.

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“…This temporal coordination between infant actions and relevant object or action naming highlights links between infants' own behaviors and words that refer to them, creating a context that links action, meaning, and language in clear and predictable ways (e.g., West et al, 2022). Moments of this sort are ripe with possibilities for word learning (e.g., Suarez-Rivera et al, 2022).…”

Section: Advances In Object Interaction and Language Developmentmentioning

confidence: 99%

Developing language in a developing body, revisited: The cascading effects of motor development on the acquisition of language

Iverson

2022

WIRES Cognitive Science

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In the first years of life, infants rapidly acquire a series of new motor skills.They learn to sit independently, to walk with skill, and to engage in a wide variety of interactions with objects. Over these same years, infants also begin to develop language. These are not isolated events. In a complex developing system, even small changes in one domain can have far-reaching effects on development in other domains. This is the fundamental idea behind the rich framework known as the developmental cascades perspective. Here we employ this framework to show how early motor advances can exert downstream effects on the development of language. Focusing first on the emergence of independent sitting, then on the development of walking, and finally on changes in the ways in which infants act on and combine actions on objects, we describe how the nature and quality of infant actions change dramatically over the first few years and how this brings with it new possibilities for engaging the environment, more sophisticated ways of interacting with people, and significant alterations in communications directed by caregivers to the infant and coordinated with infant action in time and in meaning. The developmental cascades framework provides an approach for understanding how advances in motor skills influence communicative and language development, and more generally, for conceptualizing the constant, dynamic, and complex interplay between developing infants and their environments as it unfolds over time.

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Joint engagement in the home environment is frequent, multimodal, timely, and structured

Cited by 36 publications

References 68 publications

Infants’ object interactions are long and complex during everyday joint engagement

Infants’ object interactions are long and complex during everyday joint engagement

From Play to Language: Infants’ Actions on Objects Cascade to Word Learning

Developing language in a developing body, revisited: The cascading effects of motor development on the acquisition of language

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