Child-carrying practices and early object manipulation: Comparing daylong recordings in two cultural contexts

• In Event: Poster Session 12
  In Poster Session: PS 12 Topic - Language, Communication

Abstract

When infants hold and manipulate objects, they create opportunities for joint learning scenarios with their caregivers. Indeed, child-held objects take up a substantial region of children's visual field, bringing them into visual and tactile focus simultaneously (e.g., Yu et al., 2009). Children’s focus on manual activity increases over the first two years (e.g., Jayaraman et al., 2015; Fausey et al., 2016), during which time they start to roll over, sit on their own, and move around independently. That said, while children’s manual object manipulation provides fertile opportunities for social learning, it is unclear how often such opportunities arise during their daily lives. Further, cross-cultural differences in how children are carried, where they are placed, and what kinds of objects and events typically surround them guarantee wide variability in children's object handling.

We tracked 80 children’s (0;0–4;0) object handling in a pair of unrelated small-scale traditional communities with divergent practices for carrying children (40 per community): in one community children are carried on their mother's back for most waking hours during the first year of life (Tseltal; Mayan); in the other children are instead carried in caregivers' arms during this same period (Rossel; Papuan). While both communities are remote, the Tseltal community is more commercially connected to the Western, industrial world, and hence objects that are designed specifically for children's interest and manual manipulation are far more frequently found in the Tseltal context. Children wore a small photo camera on their chest for 7–11 hours at home, with snapshots taken every 15–30 seconds. We annotated >110k photos, checking when the child was holding and/or manipulating an object.

Divergent carrying practices between these two communities appear to manifest in distinct trajectories of early object holding. Across both sites, the first four years are marked by an enormous increase in the frequency of object holding (from ~0% to ~30% of the time or more). However, the Mayan children show a significantly greater increase with age, ultimately displaying a rate of object manipulation much higher than that of same-aged Rossel children (i.e., ~35% vs. 25% between 3;6 and 4;0). Interestingly, the Mayan infants also show much lower rates of object holding before 0;10—at this age they are more tightly bound throughout the day compared to Rossel children. Time-of-day analysis also suggests that object-holding rates peak in the late morning for children ages 1;0 and older in both communities, but peak at midday for younger Mayan infants and peak bimodally (in the morning and afternoon) for younger Rossel infants.

These results suggest that, before children start to locomote independently, carrying practices strongly impact how often and when children handle objects. Once children begin to walk independently, social vs. object-centric play tendencies may play a greater role in object-holding frequency. We discuss these findings in light of supplementary linguistic and motor development data collected with the same children.

Author

• Marisa Casillas, University of Chicago
  Presenting Author