Parental responsiveness to infant behaviors is a strong predictor of infants' language and cognitive outcomes. The mechanisms underlying this effect, however, are relatively unknown. We examined the effects of parent speech on infants' visual attention, manual actions, hand‐eye coordination, and dyadic joint attention during parent‐infant free play. We report on two studies that used head‐mounted eye trackers in increasingly naturalistic laboratory environments. In Study 1, 12‐to‐24‐month‐old infants and their parents played on the floor of a seminaturalistic environment with 24 toys. In Study 2, a different sample of dyads played in a home‐like laboratory with 10 toys and no restrictions on their movement. In both studies, we present evidence that responsive parent speech extends the duration of infants' multimodal attention. This social “boost” of parent speech impacts multiple behaviors that have been linked to later outcomes—visual attention, manual actions, hand‐eye coordination, and joint attention. Further, the amount that parents talked during the interaction was negatively related to the effects of parent speech on infant attention. Together, these results provide evidence of a trade‐off between quantity of speech and its effects, suggesting multiple pathways through which parents impact infants' multimodal attention to shape the moment‐by‐moment dynamics of an interaction.
Postural developments modulate children’s visual access to social information
The ability to process social information is a critical component of children’s early language and cognitive development. However, as children reach their first birthday, they begin to locomote themselves, dramatically affecting their visual access to this information. How do these postural and locomotor changes affect children’s access to the social information relevant for word-learning? Here, we explore this question by using head-mounted cameras to record 36 infants’ (8-16 months of age) egocentric visual perspective and use computer vision algorithms to estimate the proportion of faces and hands in infants’ environments. We find that infants’ posture and orientation to their caregiver modulates their access to social information, confirming previous work that suggests motoric developments play a significant role in the emergence of children’s linguistic and social capacities. We suggest that the combined use of head-mounted cameras and the application of new computer vision techniques is a promising avenue for understanding the statistics of infants’ visual and linguistic experience.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1714726
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10127823
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Proceedings of the 40th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society.
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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