Parental Use of Multimodal Cues in the Initiation of Joint Attention as a Function of Child Hearing Status

Abstract

In the current study we examine how hearing parents use multimodal cuing to establish joint attention with their hearing (n = 9) or deaf (n = 9) children during a free-play session. The deaf children were all candidates for cochlear implantation who had not yet been implanted, and each hearing child was age-matched to a deaf child. We coded parents' use of auditory, visual, and tactile cues, alone and in different combinations, during both successful and failed bids for children's attention. Although our findings revealed no clear quantitative differences in parents' use of multimodal cues as a function of child hearing status, secondary analyses revealed that hearing parents of deaf children used shorter utterances while initiating joint attention than did hearing parents of hearing children. Hearing parents of deaf children also touched their children twice as often throughout the play session than did hearing parents of hearing children. These findings demonstrate that parents differentially accommodate the specific needs of their hearing and deaf children in subtle ways to establish communicative intent. Joint attention in hearing-status matched dyads Joint attention refers to the shared focus of two people on object. It is achieved when one person alerts the other to the object of interest. For dyads consisting of a young child and a parent, periods CONTACT Heather Bortfeld

Revisiting how we operationalize joint attention

“…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.…”

Patterns of maternal interactive behaviors and dual vocabulary development in Mexican American children.

“…Krippendorff’s α (Krippendorff, 2004; 2011) was used to assess interrater reliability because, in comparison to metrics traditionally used in the literature on parent–child interactions (e.g., intraclass correlation and Cohen’s κ), Krippendorff’s α accounts for chance, can accommodate multiple coders, is sensitive to the size of values used in coding data, and takes into consideration the measure of the codes (e.g., ordinal vs. interval; Antoine et al, 2014). Krippendorff’s α has been previously used as a reliability estimate in studies of parent–child interactions (e.g., Gabouer et al, 2020; Grimminger et al, 2020) and proposed as the standard reliability measure for coded data (Hayes & Krippendorff, 2007). Values at or above .80 are considered good whereas values between .67 and .80 require tentative conclusions (Krippendorff, 2004).…”