Cross-cultural evidence for multimodal motherese: Asian Indian mothers’ adaptive use of synchronous words and gestures

Abstract

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.

What leads to coordinated attention in parent–toddler interactions? Children's hearing status matters

“…This is because in free‐flowing toy play, the object held by one's hand(s) at a moment usually aligns well with their focus of attention and therefore provides a reliable and complementary (in addition to gaze) measure of one's attentional focus through manual action (Bambach et al, ; Yoshida & Smith, ). Previous studies have shown that moving an object while talking about it at the same time can increase the saliency of the object and facilitate young children's learning of object names (Gogate, Bolzani, & Betancourt, ; Gogate, Maganti, & Bahrick, 2; Lund & Schuele, ). It is very likely that moving an object attracts children's attention more than simply holding an object still and makes it easier for young children to follow in and look at the object of parents' focus of attention.…”

Contingencies Between Infants’ Gaze, Vocal, and Manual Actions and Mothers’ Object-Naming: Longitudinal Changes From 4 to 9 Months

“…Some of the regularities in activity around caregiver speech are provided by caregivers' paralinguistic 115 actions. During infants' first year, caregivers' object-name productions are embedded in multimodal behavioral complexes featuring synchronous speech and object motion (Gogate, Bahrick, & Watson, 2000;Gogate, Maganti, & Bahrick, 2015;Matatyaho & Gogate, 2008). In one study, mothers taught 6-to 8-month-old infants two novel object words.…”

Enhanced attention to speaking faces versus other event types emerges gradually across infancy.

“…Contingent responses to infant babbling promote and shape speech development (Goldstein, King, & West, 2003). Mapping words to objects entails coordinating visual and auditory information, and parents scaffold learning by timing verbal labels with gaze and/or object movement (Gogate, Bahrick, & Watson, 2000; Gogate, Maganti, & Bahrick, 2015; Gogate, Walker-Andrews, & Bahrick, 2001; Gogate & Hollich, 2010). Parents also exaggerate visual and auditory prosody to highlight meaning bearing parts of the speech stream (“multimodal motherese”; Gogate et al, 2000, 2015; Kim & Johnson, 2014; Smith & Strader, 2014).…”