In a quasi-experimental study, twenty-four Asian-Indian mothers were asked to teach novel (target) names for two objects and two actions to their children of three different levels of lexical-mapping development, pre-lexical (5–8 months), early-lexical (9–17 months), and advanced-lexical (20–43 months). Target (N = 1482) and non-target (other, N = 2411) naming was coded for synchronous spoken words and object motion (multimodal motherese) and other naming styles. Indian mothers abundantly used multimodal motherese with target words to highlight novel word-referent relations, paralleling earlier findings from American mothers (Gogate, Bahrick, & Watson, 2000). They used it with target words more often for pre-lexical infants than advanced-lexical children, and to name target actions later into children’s development. Unlike American mothers, Indian mothers also abundantly used multimodal motherese to name target objects later into children’s development. Finally, monolingual mothers who spoke a verb-dominant Indian language used multimodal motherese more often than bilingual mothers who also spoke noun-dominant English to their child. The findings suggest that within a dynamic and reciprocal mother-infant communication system, multimodal motherese adapts to unify novel words and referents across cultures. It adapts to children’s level of lexical development and to ambient language-specific lexical-dominance hierarchies.

https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.5592637.

No abstract

These findings suggest that even near-term preterm infants present with a delay in their sensitivity to synchrony in syllable–object pairings relative to term infants. Given the important role that synchrony plays in word mapping at 6–9 months, this early delay in sensitivity to synchrony might be an indicator of word mapping delays found in older preterm infants.

The research Ethics committee of the Faculty of Pedagogy and Psychology (ELTE) granted a central permission (permission nr: 2019/47). Many other labs obtained IRB approval too, which approvals can be found here: https://osf.io/j6kte/ . Participants had to give informed consent before starting the experiment. Only participants recruited through Mturk or Prolific received monetary compensation.Note that full information on the approval of the study protocol must also be provided in the manuscript.

The present review is a novel synthesis of research on infants' attention in two related domains-crossmodal perception and word mapping. The authors hypothesize that infant attention is malleable and shifts in real time. They review dynamic models of infant attention and provide empirical evidence for parallel trends in attention shifts from the two domains that support their hypothesis. When infants are exposed to competing auditory-visual stimuli in experiments, multiple factors cause attention to shift during infant-environment interactions. Additionally, attention shifts across nested timescales and individual variations in attention systematically explain development. They suggest future research to further elucidate the causal mechanisms that influence infants' attention dynamics, emphasizing the need to examine individual variations that index shifts over time.

It is known that a parallel computer can solve problems that are impossible to be solved sequentially. That is, any general purpose sequential model of computation, such as the Turing machine or the random access machine (RAM), cannot simulate certain computations, for example solutions to real-time problems, that are carried out by a specific parallel computer. This paper extends the scope of such problems to the class of problems with uncertain time constraints. The first type of time constraints refers to uncertain time requirements on the input data, that is when and for how long are input data available. A second type of time constraints refers to uncertain deadlines for tasks. The main contribution of this paper is to exhibit computational problems in which it is very difficult to find out (read compute) what to do and when to do it. Furthermore, problems with uncertain time constraints, as described in this paper, prove once more, that it is impossible to define a universal computer, that is, a computer able to simulate all computable functions.

This experimental study examined bilingual (English and another noun-dominant language) and monolingual (English) preverbal (10.5-month-old) and postverbal (12.5-month-old) infants’ word-action mapping. Sixteen infants in each group were habituated to dynamic video-displays of novel word-action pairings during infant-controlled habituation. They received two words, /wem/ and /bæf/, spoken synchronously with an adult shaking or looming an object, and were tested with switched versus same word-action pairings. Results revealed that for the preverbal bilingual infants, word-action mapping is intensified relative to postverbal bilingual infants. For the postverbal bilingual infants, word-action mapping is attenuated and inversely correlated with noun learning. No such differences were observed in the monolingual infants. These findings illustrate a perceptual protraction prior to word production, and accelerated perceptual narrowing to nouns after word production in bilingual infants learning two noun-dominant languages.