Infant-Directed Communication: Speech, Action, Gesture, Emotion, and Touch in Caregiver-Infant Interactions

• In Event: Poster Session 11
  In Poster Session: PS 11 Topic - Language, Communication

Abstract

The quality of infants' early social interactions is consequential for language and cognitive development (e.g., Weisleder & Fernald, 2013; Hirsh-Pasek et al., 2015; Hart & Risley, 1995). However, current investigations into how input quality impacts learning have focused predominantly on infant-directed speech (IDS). While speech is a ubiquitous feature of infants’ experience, everyday input comes from a variety of interconnected signals across domains. The goal of the current study is to augment research on IDS by investigating “infant-directed communication” (IDC): the suite of communicative signals from caregivers to infants including speech, action, gesture, emotion, and touch. These five signals and their interactions have the potential to redefine how developmental scientists conceive of infants’ early learning environments, and enhance our understanding of relations between caregiver input and early learning.

Infant-directed modifications in speech, action, gesture, emotion, and touch have independently been shown to promote infants’ engagement and learning (e.g., Brand, Baldwin, & Ashburn, 2002; Iverson et al., 1999; Chong et al., 2013; Stack & Muir, 1990). However, the dynamics of caregiver-infant interactions, integrating across all of these domains, has received substantially less attention. To investigate IDC, we invited caregivers and their 18- to 24-month-old infants to engage in 10 minutes of natural play while being recorded on Zoom (see Figure 1). We have collected our full sample of 44 caregiver-infant dyads and are coding the videos for IDC using extensively detailed, pre-established methods for each of the domains in ELAN (2020). Currently, 11 videos are fully coded (see Figure 2 for an example visualization), and coding will be completed by mid-November 2020 Thus, all data will be analyzed well in advance of SRCD.

Comprehensive coding allows us to examine our data in three primary ways. First, we will describe variability in the extent to which caregivers engage in IDC in interactions with their infant. Second, we will explore differences in IDC across domains. It might be the case that caregivers are overall ‘higher’ or ‘lower’ in IDC (as in IDS; Weisleder & Fernald, 2013). If so, caregivers who frequently use infant-directed emotion would generally also engage in more infant-directed action, gesture, touch, and speech. Alternatively, caregivers’ IDC could be heavily influenced by one domain, e.g., they might use a lot of infant-directed touch but relatively little infant-directed action, gesture, emotion, and speech. Third, we will investigate the temporal structure of IDC in caregiver-infant interactions. Our coding allows us to ask whether different dimensions of IDC occur in a clustered way across time or whether each domain of IDC tends to occur in isolation.

Harnessing variability in multidimensional caregiver input will provide important new insights into the true richness of infants’ everyday social interactions. This work sets the stage for future investigations into how IDC varies across the SES spectrum and across world cultures, as well as how brain-to-behavior coupling emerges between caregivers and infants across development.

Authors

• Jessica Elizabeth Kosie, Princeton University
  Presenting Author

• Ella Whitfield, Princeton University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Casey Lew-Williams, Princeton University
  Non-Presenting Author