2-022 - Finding Common Ground: Three Approaches Highlighting the Importance of Interaction in Early Language Development

Session Type: Paper Symposium

Integrative Statement

How do infants and caregivers find common ground for communicating with each other? In the past, most researchers attributed this achievement solely to abilities within the infant, such as innate abilities or the capacity to follow gaze or pointing behavior. Further, many focused on product, how many words were learned when, rather than process, how words might be learned. In contrast, the approaches of the participants in this symposium are rooted in caregiver-infant interaction which specifies how caregivers shape infant behavior to become communicative and are informed by naturalistic situations.

In joint activities, caregivers provide a context for the nurturing and emergence of the socially-mediated performance of cultural skills. This education occurs in real-time and makes prominent the affordances - opportunities for action - that are jointly available in the course of the continuous unfolding of their interaction. Communicating is not a one-way street, instead, the perceiving and acting (behavior) of one person continuously affects that of the other.

One paper investigated prosodic bootstrapping by comparing IDS (infant directed speech) to ADS (adult directed speech) using a new method, time alignment, to detect utterance boundaries based on pause and word duration in caregiver speech. Another report of IDS examined measures of temporal and semantic responsiveness which proved to be significant predictors of vocabulary at 18 months. Lastly, an experimental study, using eye-tracking technology and measures of pupil dilation investigated why the synchrony of gesture and word in caregiver input leads to enhanced word learning in infants of 9-15 months.

Sub Unit

• Language, Communication

Chair

• Patricia Zukow-Goldring, University of California, Los Angeles

Discussant

• Eve V Clark, Stanford University

Individual Presentations

• The Role of Caregiver Responsiveness in Early Language Development: Evidence from Video and LENA™ Recordings - Presenting Author: Michelle McGillion, University of Sheffield; Jane Herbert, Univ of Sheffield; Julian Pine, University of Liverpool; Marilyn M Vihman, University of York; Tamar Keren-Portnoy, Univ of York; Rory DePaolis, James Madison University; Danielle Matthews, University of Sheffield

• Words, Pauses, and Boundaries in Child-Directed Speech - Presenting Author: Eon-Suk Ko, Seoul National University; Eun-Sol Kim, Dept. of Computer Science & Engineering, Seoul National University; Byung-Tak Zhang, Dept. of Computer Science & Engineering, Seoul National University

• Why Synchrony Matters in Early Infant Word Learning: How Show Gestures Direct Gaze and Stoke Arousal - Presenting Author: Nancy de Villiers Rader, Ithaca College; Patricia Zukow-Goldring, University of California, Los Angeles