Patterns of attention‐sensitive communication contribute to 7–20‐month‐olds' emerging pragmatic skills

Abstract

The present study aimed at investigating the ability of 7‐ to 20‐month‐old infants to display attention‐sensitive communication using either canonical markers of language acquisition (e.g., pointing gestures, canonical babblings) or other signals based on the physical features actually perceived by the mother in everyday interaction (e.g., body movements, mouth sounds). We studied 30 French mother‐infant dyads in naturalistic settings. We assessed the infants' attention‐sensitive communication through unimodal and cross‐modal adjustment, defined as the capacity of infants to address visually inattentive mothers by avoiding visual communication mismatches and/or favoring communication matches through audible‐or‐contact signals. Unimodal and cross‐modal adjustments were tested for specific signals across spontaneous “conditions” of maternal visual attention (attentive/inattentive) from video footage filmed in the home. Both canonical markers of language development and signals belonging to an extended repertoire of communication were used by infants to adjust to their mother's visual attention. Gaze‐coordinated signals were overall not significantly better adjusted to maternal attention than non‐gaze‐coordinated signals, except for specific silent‐visual signals at certain ages. Overall, these results indicate that attention‐sensitive communication is relevant to the development of early pragmatic skills and that the intentional use of signals may be more reliably approximated by this capacity than by gaze‐coordination with signals.

Attention-sensitive signalling by 7- to 20-month-old infants in a comparative perspective

“…This result is globally consistent with previous work on infants’ coupling of pointing gestures and vocalisations in declarative pointing tasks ( Gros-Louis and Wu, 2012 ; Wu and Gros-Louis, 2014 , 2017 ). The early onset of unimodal adjustment found here may come from the consideration of an extended repertoire of signals that can possibly be adjusted earlier than pointing gestures (e.g., smiles : Jones et al, 1991 ; Jones and Hong, 2001 , 2005 ; proximal deictics gestures : Rodríguez et al, 2015 ; Murillo et al, 2019 ; gaze-coordinated body movements : Bourjade et al, 2023 ; Dafreville et al, 2024 ).…”