1-197 - Cooperative and Contingent Communication: Early Social Mechanisms of Infant Language Learning

Session Type: Paper Symposium

Integrative Statement

Early verbal and nonverbal communication between parents and infants facilitates language development. Evidence from diverse scientific approaches indicates that a crucial mechanism driving this relationship is the mutually rewarding experience of initiating, responding, and being responded to in early interactions. The presented talks aim to elucidate how and why the contingent and cooperative nature of the responses parents and infants provide to one another foster language learning.

This symposium brings together research from a range of developmental perspectives and methodologies including neural and behavioral measures of infant development. Paper 1 will discuss reward-pathway activation during shared interactions in both young songbirds and infants, indicating that infant learning may be driven by the desire to engage in rewarding social interactions. Paper 2 will present evidence demonstrating that contingent parent responses and infants’ caregiver-directed vocalizations predict language growth from 12 to 18 months, as well as the development of social, attentional, and linguistic skills. Paper 3 will present findings on how cooperative communication, the dynamic back and forth of nonverbal and verbal behaviors, between parents and their 7-month-old infants leads to increased talkativeness and improved vocabulary at 18 months. Paper 4 will discuss how parents and their infants align the duration and timing of their nonverbal communicative actions to one another during toy play and how that alignment relates to language learning. Together, these talks will demonstrate the advantages of bringing diverse methodologies to bear on communicative development questions and will emphasize cooperative communication as a social mechanism for infant language learning.

Sub Unit

• Language, Communication

Chair

• Doireann T Hobbs-Renzi, University of Maryland

Individual Presentations

• Early Development of nonverbal turn-taking communication between infants and parents during toy play - Presenting Author: Chen Yu, Indiana University; Seth Foster, Indiana University; Linda Smith, Indiana University

• Two minds are better than one: Cooperative communication facilitates infant language learning - Presenting Author: Doireann T Hobbs-Renzi, University of Maryland; Alexa Romberg, University of Maryland College Park; Donald J Bolger, University of Maryland; Rochelle Newman, University of Maryland

• The association between parent-infant vocal interactions and infants’ social communicative skills - Presenting Author: Julie J Gros-Louis, University of Iowa

• Reward-based vocal learning in social context: A comparative approach linking brain and behavior - Presenting Author: Michael H. Goldstein, Cornell University; Samantha V Carouso, Cornell University; Jennifer A Schwade, Cornell University