Attentional abilities constrain language development: A cross‐syndrome infant/toddler study

Abstract

The ability to actively select and attend to relevant aspects of the ever-changing environment, by shifting one's focus of visual attention, is crucial for learning and development (Stevens & Bavelier, 2012). For example, Slaughter and McConnell (2003) found that an infant's ability to follow gaze is related to their language ability. It is therefore possible that infants use eye gaze to infer what object or event is being referred to and labelled by their caregiver; certainly, infants are more likely to learn an object's label if the object being labelled dominates their visual field (Pereira, Smith, & Yu, 2014). Also, the ability to match auditory and visual information positively correlates with language ability, which suggests that visual processing bootstraps word learning (Bahrick, Todd, & Soska, 2018). Consequently, any irregularity in shifting attention may constrain how one interacts with, and thus learns from, the environment, with deleterious effects. Irregularities in shifting attention have been observed in children with neurodevelopmental

An Integrated Perspective on Spatio-Temporal Attention and Infant Language Acquisition

“…Indeed, despite our participants belonging to a typically developing sample, the huge inter-participant variability registered confirms that attentional development can follow different possible trajectories, also requiring qualitative approaches to be understood. Furthermore, our results demonstrate that variability in language outcomes can be related to variability in early visual disengagement even in a sample of typically developing infants, as also reported from a recent study by D'Souza and colleagues [16]. In particular, the research from D'Souza and colleagues (2020) reported that performances in visual disengagement of attention are associated with subsequent language development in both typically developing infants and other chromosomic clinical profiles (i.e., Down syndrome, William syndrome, and Fragile X syndrome).…”

“…In particular, children and adolescents with Specific Language Impairments and Developmental Dyslexia have been found to struggle in detecting short series of both auditory and visual stimuli, when the amount of available time is limited [12][13][14][15]. Similarly, visual disengagement performances (i.e., speed of disengagement) are associated with atypical language acquisition in infants and toddlers with several chromosomic clinical pictures (i.e., Down syndrome, William syndrome, Fragile X syndrome) [16], and Autism Spectrum Disorder [54].…”

“…From 0 to 2 months of life, the phenomena of "obligatory attention" or "sticky fixation" [8] are indeed 2 of 20 common, and efficiency to disengage and shift gaze toward new stimuli only emerges at around 3 to 4 months of life, when the neural maturation of the visual pathway [7,9] and associated subcortical structures [10] allows for the first inhibitory mechanisms and thus, early cortical control. Atypical visual orienting (e.g., longer visual latencies) still present at 7 months has indeed been identified as a prodromal feature of Autism Spectrum Syndrome [11]; moreover, a general "sluggish" ability to disengage attention has been found to be related with developmental language disorders (e.g., Developmental Dyslexia and Specific Language Impairment) [12][13][14][15] and with other neurodevelopmental disorders (including Down syndrome, fragile X syndrome, and William syndrome) [16]. Efficiency in the disengagement of attention is, therefore, an index of early inhibitory control, selective attention, and tendency to explore the external world, with clear positive impacts on communication and language acquisition [17,18].…”

Ed Zigler's developmental approach to intellectual disabilities: Past, present, and future contributions

“…From this study arose the idea that specific maternal interactional behaviors – in this case the mother commenting on the child's focus of attention – speed the child's linguistic development more than a directive, overinvolved maternal style. Such findings – and the very idea of “following the child's lead” – continue to be refined to this day (D'Souza, D'Souza, Jones, & Karmiloff-Smith, 2020). Similarly, many studies have appeared on parenting children with ID (Hodapp, Casale, & Sanderson, 2019) and on family functioning during adulthood (Glidden, Floyd, Hastings, & Mailick, in press).…”

Early Visual Attention Abilities and Audiovisual Speech Processing in 5–7 Month-Old Down Syndrome and Typically Developing Infants

“…Importantly, attentional (cognitive) impairments in DS infants go beyond the abovementioned impairments in visual speech processing and attention to faces. DS toddlers are slower in disengaging their visual attention from an object they have been engaged to, in comparison to chronologically or mentally-age matched TD infants, as shown by [ 34 ]. The same study showed that being faster in visual attention disengagement relates with higher expressive and receptive vocabulary abilities in both TD and DS toddlers.…”