Poster #6 - Parental Input On Infants' Vocabulary Through Joint Attention

• In Event: Poster Session 17

Abstract

Introduction:
Young infants as early as 8 months are sensitive to the direction of others’ gaze direction. This early responsiveness to a social partner’s attention direction, a.k.a. child responsiveness to parent-initiated joint attention (RJA), has been strongly linked to early vocabulary development (Morales et al., 2000; Mundy & Gomes, 1998). Despite this intriguing link between early sensitivity and vocabulary achievement, we know little about how such sensitivity and/or early social attention becomes relevant to vocabulary achievement. The present study uses head-mounted eye-tracking systems during parent-child play to address this question. Head-mounted eye-tracking systems have been used to successfully measured joint attention (JA) by annotating gaze behaviors (Yu & Smith, 2013; Sun & Yoshida, 2022) and have revealed the link between JA and receptive vocabulary size (Abney et al., 2020; Yu, Suanda, & Smith, 2018). With this method, the present study aims to test the role of parental input in the relation between early responsiveness to parent-initiated joint attention (RJA) along with other social attention behaviors and vocabulary development.

Methods:
22 English monolingual typically-developing parent-infant dyads (M = 12.16 months, SD = 2.56 months, 8 males, 14 females) participated in the present study. Parent-child dyads participated in a 320-second semi-naturalistic play session with eight unique toy objects while wearing head-mounted eye trackers, and parents were instructed to play as naturally as possible. Parents also completed the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Developmental Inventory (MCDI) Words and Gestures (Fenson et al., 1993), a parental vocabulary checklist that measures the English receptive and expressive vocabulary size of infants 8 to 18 months old.

One target social gaze (RJA) and two other socially-coordinated gaze behavior types - IJA (infant-initiated JA) and visual optimal naming moments (VONM; moments when parents name the object while the infant was looking at the named object) - were coded for frequency and duration frame-by-frame by trained research assistants. We also annotated two parental social cues: parents’ object naming and object looking.

Results:
Preliminary results confirm the relation between social attention and vocabulary size. IJA frequency (p = .007) and duration (p = .006), RJA frequency (p = .033) and duration (p = .015), and VONM duration (p = .012) was significantly predictive of receptive vocabulary size. VONM frequency was not significant (p = 0.139). IJA frequency (p = .012) and duration (p = .002), RJA frequency (p = .006) and duration (p = .005), and VONM frequency (p = .010) and duration (p = .023) was significantly predictive of expressive vocabulary size. We are currently conducting stepwise regression analyses to decide the best model to export. We aim to (1) first demonstrate the significance of JA on vocabulary, (2) add parental input, and then (3) compare the model fit to test the role of parental input.

Conclusion:
The present study used head-mounted eye-trackers for infants and their parents during an interactive play session to study how parents’ social input may be relevant to the documented early attention-vocabulary link. The current results and ongoing analyses have the potential to reveal a process in which early sensitivity to a parent’s gaze direction becomes relevant to language development.

Authors

• Elizabeth Susan Perkovich, University of Houston
  Presenting Author

• Hanako Yoshida, University of Houston