Infant engagement and early vocabulary development: a naturalistic observation study of Mozambican infants from 1;1 to 2;1

Abstract

This study analyzes how others engage rural and urban Mozambican infants during naturalistic observations, and how the proportion of time spent in different engagements relates to infants' language development over the second year of life. Using an extended version of Bakeman and Adamson's (1984) categorization of infant engagement, we investigated to what extent a detailed analysis of infant engagement can contribute to our understanding of vocabulary development in natural settings. In addition, we explored how the different infant engagements relate to vocabulary size, and how these differ between the two communities. Results show that rural infants spend significantly more time in forms of solitary engagement, whereas urban infants spend more time in forms of triadic joint engagement. In regard to correlations with reported productive vocabulary, we find that dyadic persons engagement (i.e. interactions not about concrete objects) has positive correlations with vocabulary measures in both rural and urban communities. In addition, we find that triadic coordinated joint attention has a positive relationship with vocabulary in the urban community, but a contrasting negative correlation with vocabulary in the rural community. These similarities and differences are explained, based upon the parenting beliefs and socialization practices of different prototypical learning environments. Overall, this study concludes that the extended categorization provides a valuable contribution to the analysis of infant engagement and their relation to language acquisition, especially for analyzing naturalistic observations as compared to semi-structured studies. Moreover, with respect to vocabulary development, Mozambican infants appear to benefit strongest from dyadic Persons engagement, while they do not necessarily benefit from joint attention, as tends to be the case for children from industrial, developed communities.

Child‐Directed Speech Is Infrequent in a Forager‐Farmer Population: A Time Allocation Study

“…Several questions remain open for future research, the first one potentially relating to the impact of input on children's language advancement in preindustrial societies. So far, there are divergent findings among the little work looking at the predictive value of quantity of input with respect to vocabulary outcomes (e.g., Shneidman & Goldin‐Meadow, reporting a significant relationship among their Mayan sample which is replicated by Vogt & Mastin, in their urban sample but not in their rural sample) as well as the importance of speech by secondary caregivers, including children (Harkness, ; Mastin & Vogt, ; Shneidman et al., ).…”

Early Vocabulary Development in Rural and Urban Mozambique

“…Our starting point for the CDI adaptation was an original list of 113 words, consisting of the entire CDI Short Form I (89 words) and part of the CDI Short Form II (A and B) (24 words) [9]. Words from Form II were added in order to create one word list that was applicable to children up to the age of 25 months, which coincides with the age range of our longitudinal field studies [11,12]. This expansion was necessary, because Form I was designed for children between 8 and 18 months, whereas Form II was designed for children between 16 and 30 months.…”

“…The CDI was validated based on a small sample of rural and urban children who participated in our longitudinal study to investigate the relation between multimodal interactions and vocabulary development [11,12]. The validation was carried out by correlating the type frequencies of children's speech with their reported CDI scores for expressive vocabulary.…”

“…This paper presents a novel adaptation of the CDI short version [9] into three languages spoken in Mozambique: Changana, Ronga, and (Mozambican) Portuguese. The adaptation was designed for the purpose of a study on the cultural and social aspects of language acquisition in a rural monolingual Changana speaking community and an urban, bilingual Ronga and Portuguese speaking community [10][11][12]. Changana and Ronga are mutually intelligible Southern Bantu languages within the Tsonga language group, which is also spoken in parts of South Africa [13,14].…”

La migración del campo a la ciudad y la amplitud del vocabulario de los niños peruanos a los 8 años de edad

“…Si bien es conocida la brecha en el desempeño educativo en el Perú entre los niños que viven en zonas urbanas y en rurales, este estudio permite conocer que la movilidad geográfica interviene también en el rendimiento cognitivo. De acuerdo con la teoría ecológica de Bronfenbrenner (1987) y la evidencia hallada en algunos estudios (Brownell et al, 2016;Mastin y Vogt, 2015;Romay et al, 2012), se comprueba el rol fundamental que tiene el contexto rural y el cambio de este sobre el desarrollo lingüístico y cognitivo del niño.…”