The Diversity of Social Contingency and its Contributions to Social and Communicative Development

Session Type: Paper Symposium

Abstract

Four talks focus on social contingency—the experience of social cues that are dependent upon or in response to an organism’s behavior—as a learning mechanism enabling humans and non-human animals to detect communicative signals within their environment. These talks present converging evidence from multiple experimental paradigms that social contingency is foundational to the development of communicative and social-interactive skills.
The first talk explores how social contingency helps infants realize the communicative, intentional, and referential nature of words and contribute to vocabulary development. Parents’ responsiveness to infants’ non-verbal behaviors during the first year of life predict subsequent vocabulary growth beyond the exposure to language.
The second talk examines caregiver verbal responses contingent on 1- to 2-year-old infants’ own vocal productions and quantifies the communicative functions of these early infant words in two sociodemographic groups: Latinx and European-Americans.
The third talk examines neural mechanisms linking socially contingent caregiving to infants’ social-interactive skills in the first year of life. Longitudinal data demonstrate that infants’ neural responses during contingent interactions are concurrently related to their joint attention skills, and they mediate the relation between early experience with maternal contingent responsiveness and later infant social communication.
The fourth talk explores parallels in the socially-embedded communicative development of immature songbirds and prelinguistic human infants. Longitudinal data demonstrate that contingent social responses guide development of efficient vocal sequence production and overall communicative outcomes in both taxa.
Taken together, findings illuminate the remarkable power of social contingency’s role in shaping early communicative and social development.

Sub Unit

• Language, Communication

Chairs

• Steven L Elmlinger, Cornell University

• Elena Luchkina, Northwestern University

Individual Presentations

• Social contingency facilitates infants’ vocabulary growth above and beyond word input - Presenting Author: Elena Luchkina, Northwestern University; Fei Xu, University of California - Berkeley

• Communicative Functions of Infant Everyday Word Productions - Presenting Author: Catalina Suarez-Rivera, New York University; Nicole Pinheiro; Mackenzie Swirbul, New York University; Catherine S Tamis-Lemonda, New York University

• Maternal Contingent Responsiveness Longitudinally Predicts Infants’ Real-Time Neural Responses to Socially Contingent Events - Presenting Author: Lindsay Caroline Bowman, University of California - Davis; Serena K Mon, Northwestern University; Tahli Ida Frenkel, Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya, Ziama Arkin Infancy Institute

• The Social Origins of Vocal Sequence Learning: a Comparative Approach - Presenting Author: Steven L Elmlinger, Cornell University; Samantha Carouso-Peck, Cornell University; Annalise H. Wilk, Cornell University; Michael H. Goldstein, Cornell University