Social and communicative development in infancy (original) (raw)
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SOCIAL SCIENCES BULLETIN, 2019
The article observes studies of word categorization in 3- to 4-months-old infants questioning their main conclusion that young infants may categorize words themselves. The review shows that there is no bilateral communication between them and adults as well as any perceptual interaction that can help infants acquire language. And yet language acquisition requires children to begin categorizing objects even before they initiate to develop their communication ñ which happens only from the age of 12 months ñ since they need to already understand social reality with a minimum set of its phenomena before any communication. Hence, the idea of some mental collaboration between young infants and their caregivers that helps them to acquire a first language makes sense, and these studies show the manifestation of such non-perceptual social interaction. There is every reason to believe that the authors of the analyzed researches excluded any perceptual interaction from experiments that could help infants improve their performance, which also supports this above idea. Their weak results with Cantonese language gives another reason to think so, since English-speaking caregivers (and/or supervisors) could not mentally help infants categorize words during this experiment, as they did not understand Cantonese language.
Social Interaction Shapes Infants’ Earliest Links Between Language and Cognition
Sociālo Zinātņu Vēstnesis=Social Sciences Bulletin, 2020
The article observes studies of word categorization in 3-to 4-months-old infants questioning their main conclusion that young infants may categorize words themselves. The review shows that there is no bilateral communication between them and adults as well as any perceptual interaction that can help infants acquire language. And yet language acquisition requires children to begin categorizing objects even before they initiate to develop their communication ñ which happens only from the age of 12 months ñ since they need to already understand social reality with a minimum set of its phenomena before any communication. Hence, the idea of some mental collaboration between young infants and their caregivers that helps them to acquire a first language makes sense, and these studies show the manifestation of such non-perceptual social interaction. There is every reason to believe that the authors of the analyzed researches excluded any perceptual interaction from experiments that could help infants improve their performance, which also supports this above idea. Their weak results with Cantonese language gives another reason to think so, since English-speaking caregivers (and/or supervisors) could not mentally help infants categorize words during this experiment, as they did not understand Cantonese language.
Developmental Changes in Early Communicative Competence
1991
A proposed model of communicative behavior suggests a series of seven progressively more complex levels of communicative competence: (1) behavior state; (2) recognitory; (3) contingency; (4) instrumental; (5) triadic; (6) verbal-contextual; and (7) verbal-decontextual. Tables define these levels in detail and list their characteristics. Each level is exemplified by particular engagement and termination behaviors. In a study designed to determine whether children follow the proposed model, a total of 68 children between 1 day and 30 months of age were observed while playing with their mothers. Interactions were coded for children's communicative behaviors, and performance criteria were established for mastery of each level of communicative competence. Also noted were the age at which a behavior from a particular level first appeared; the basal age, at which at least one child met the criteria for mastery of a behavior; and the ceiling age, at which all children exhibited mastery of the level. Results indicated that, beginning with level 3, the first appearance of a behavior from a level was concurrent with the basal age for the preceding level. Results supported the proposed model. Estimated age ranges fo-each level are given. A list of 55 references is provided. Appendixes include definitions of specific termination and engagement behaviors in each of the levels and a copy of the observation coding form. (SC)
Infancy, 2003
The extent to which mothers and fathers agree on what they identify as their infant's communicative acts was investigated. Nineteen infants (6 at 6 months, 7 at 9 months, and 6 at 12 months) and their parents participated. A randomization procedure controlled for the frequencies and durations of the communicative acts identified by the parents, and the procedure produced a distribution of 10,000 "chance" agreement values for each parent pair with which their observed level of agreement was compared. The results indicated that, generally, parents could identify their infant's communicative acts consistently, and that observed levels of agreement between parents were significantly higher than would be expected by chance. Differences between mothers and fathers on their identification of communicative acts are considered in terms of the emergence of the infant's intention to communicate.
Infant-parent interactions are bidirectional; therefore, it is important to understand how infants' communicative behavior elicits variable responses from caregivers and, in turn, how infants' behavior varies with caregivers' responses; furthermore, how these moment-to-moment interactive behaviors relate to later language development. The current study addressed these concerns by observing 10-to 13-month-old infants' interactions with their mothers and measuring their language outcomes when they were 15 months old. The main results were: (1) infants were more likely to combine vocalizations with pointing when mothers were not looking at the target of the point, and when mothers did not respond about the target of the point; (2) infants' combination of vocalization and pointing behavior, especially those produced when mothers were not attending to the target object of the point, related to infants' comprehension skills at 15 months as measured by the MacArthur Communicative Development Inventory (MCDI); (3) maternal follow-in responses were related to infants' improvement in their comprehension and production scores on the MCDI. These results suggest that infants' own prelinguistic communicative acts that are produced differentially as a function of maternal attention and responses, and the maternal responses that they elicit, contribute to infants' subsequent language development.
Communication in early infancy: Three common assumptions examined and found inadequate.
Human Development, 1983
Three taken-for-granted assumptions concerning the nature of communicative interaction between infants and adults are described. Their presence is demonstrated in three differently oriented theories ofearly interaction. The assumptions -that interaction is instrumentally oriented; that meaning is obvious and unitary; that change has an external sourceare then put to empirical test, using narrative records from video-recordings made during a longitudinal study ofan infant girl and her mother. The outline ofa more adequate account of communicative exchanges is proposed.
Sharedness as an innate basis for communication in the infant
… of the Twentieth Annual Conference of …, 1998
From a cognitive perspective, intentional communication may be viewed as an agent's activity overtly aimed at modifying a partner's mental states. According to standard Gricean definitions, this requires each party to be able to ascribe mental states to the other, i.e., to entertain a so-called theory of mind. According to the relevant experimental literature, however, such capability does not appear before the third or fourth birthday; it would follow that children under that age should not be viewed as communicating agents. In order to solve the resulting dilemma, we propose that certain specific components of an agent's cognitive architecture (namely, a peculiar version of sharedness and communicative intention), are necessary and sufficient to explain infant communication in a mentalist framework. We also argue that these components are innate in the human species.
Journal of Motor Learning and Development, 2021
As a step toward understanding the developmental relationship between handedness and language lateralization, this longitudinal study investigated how infants (N = 21) move their hands in noncommunicative and communicative situations at 2 weeks and at 3 months of age. The authors looked at whether left-right asymmetry in hand movements and in duration of self-touch appeared across conditions and whether the direction of asymmetry depended on the communicative nature of the situation. The authors found that asymmetries appeared less consistently than suggested in literature and did not only depend on the communicative nature of the situation. Instead, hand activity and self-touch patterns depended on age, the presence of the mother, the degree of novelty of the situation, and the presence of an object. The results partly support previous studies that pointed out an early differentiation of communicative hand movements versus noncommunicative ones in infants. It is in terms of the amo...