Communicative Functions of Infant Everyday Word Productions

• In Event: The Diversity of Social Contingency and its Contributions to Social and Communicative Development

Abstract

Infants are active participants of timely and contingent social and language interactions. A contingent caregiver response occurs within 2-3 seconds of an infant vocalization. By being a critical part of social interactions, infants themselves play a key role for the contingencies they experience. If so, caregiver responses should depend on the communicative function of infant vocalizations.
Infant vocalizations serve different communicative functions. For example, infants may use vocalizations to refuse an object, express emotions, or request an object or action. The long-standing assumption is that infants’ early words serve a labeling function. However, infants may produce words for other purposes, and certain communicative functions may be more effective in eliciting a caregiver response. Here we quantify the degree to which mothers respond contingently to different types of communicative functions of 1-to-2-year-old’s words during natural activity at home.
Mothers and their 13-to-26-month-old infants were recorded at home during everyday activities. To gain a robust understanding of infant everyday words and their communicative functions, we worked with mothers and infants from two different sociodemographic groups: Latinx and European-American dyads. Latinx (N=30) and European-American (EA) dyads (N=30) were recorded for 103 minutes on average (SD=17.42). Mother and infant language was transcribed word by word in English and/or Spanish to identify meaningful units of speech (i.e., utterances for mothers, and vocalizations for infants). Infant vocalizations were considered a “word” if they were non-distress sounds produced by the infant that communicate a specific meaning and phonetically approximate a conventional word form (e.g., baba for bottle; uh-oh; wow). Grunts, burps, other vegetative sounds, and babbles were not coded as words. Infant words were further coded for the communicative function using an adaptation of the coding scheme created by Tamis-LeMonda, Baumwell, & Cristofaro (2012). Table 1 shows the communicative functions considered here with examples.
Preliminary results from 20 Latina mothers and their infants shows that infants produced many vocalizations during the visit (M = 296, SD = 154, Range = 119-661). On average, 10% of vocalizations fit the definition of a “word”. By this definition, infants produced on average 32.7 words (Mdn = 32.7, SD = 38, Range= 4-130) during the interaction. After normalizing, infants produced on average 11.37 words per 30 minutes (Mdn = 8.05, SD = 12.7, Range = 1.4-43). Figure 1 shows the number of infant words aggregated across all infants. The top common communicative function was objections (accounting for 25% of all words), followed by attention requests (17%) and emotional exclamations (12%).
Results show that infants varied in their repertoire of communicative functions and across infants, objections were the most common. Contrary to expectations, “labeling” accounts only for 8% of infant words. Ongoing work will apply the coding scheme to remaining Spanish-speaking participants and the entire English-speaking sample. Furthermore, we will use the onset of mother utterances to test if certain communicative functions are more effective in eliciting caregiver responses. Results will be discussed in terms of the cascading effects of caregiver contingencies dependent on the functions of infant vocalizations.

Authors

• Catalina Suarez-Rivera, New York University
  Presenting Author

• Nicole Pinheiro

• Mackenzie Swirbul, New York University

• Catherine S Tamis-Lemonda, New York University