Infants’ prelinguistic communicative acts and maternal responses: Relations to linguistic development

Abstract

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.

Language development at 18 months is related to multimodal communicative strategies at 12 months

“…The fact that infants were interacting with an unfamiliar adult neutralized the possible influence of prior caregiver-child routines and shaped interaction. Moreover, with regard to the potential effects of the use of multimodal productions on later language development, our results extend the results yielded by Murillo and Belinchón (2012) and Wu and Gros-Louis (2014) to the age of 18 months, when early production of gesture-speech combinations are found to correlate with lexical and grammatical output at that stage of development.…”

“…The results showed that the use of pointing gestures at 12 months, especially when accompanied by vocalizations and directed gaze on the part of the infant, correlated positively with vocabulary development at 15 months of age. In a recent study, Wu and Gros-Louis (2014) analyzed the spontaneous interactions of 10-to 13-month-old infants with their mothers in fifty-one dyads and showed that the infants' combinations of vocalization and pointing, and especially those produced when mothers were not attending to the target event, were related to the infants' subsequent comprehension skills at 15 months. It should be noted that both of the studies mentioned above are based on the analysis of spontaneous interactions, where it is difficult to behaviorally control for two important aspects of early communicative patterns, namely, (a) the pragmatic intention or motive behind children's use of pointing gestures to comment on an event or object; and (b) the social interaction gaze patterns used by the adult during the communication.…”

“…By using an experimental task which favors a specific declarative intention from the child and which controls for the adult's patterns of responses, we aim at extending results elicited in research by Murillo and Belinchón (2012) and Wu and Gros-Louis (2014) through an experimental task where infants are not interacting with their mothers. This controlled scenario will allow us to more thoroughly analyze the connection between infants' communicative strategies and their language outcomes 6 months later (measures in those studies were obtained just 3 months later, at 15 months of age).…”

Gesture Use in 14-Month-Old Toddlers With Hearing Loss and Their Mothers' Responses

“…Although one might hypothesize that the mothers of children with HL were less likely to recognize gestures as a form of communication or that they were singularly focused on their children's spoken language development, the evidence that signing and nonsigning mothers were similarly unresponsive to the gestures of their toddlers with HL runs contrary to these hypotheses. Regardless of the reason, it appears problematic that mothers of children with HL are not fully capitalizing on the potential to provide their children with responsive feedback, given the literature documenting the positive contributions of maternal responsiveness and prelinguistic communication to the subsequent language outcomes of children with NH (Brady, Marquis, Fleming, & McLean, 2004;Goldin-Meadow et al, 2007;Masur, 1982;Wu & Gros-Louis, 2014;Yoder & Warren, 1999). Providing responsive feedback to the gestures produced by toddlers with HL may be especially important, given that their more limited use of spoken words results in caregivers having fewer opportunities to provide children with HL with contingent feedback.…”

“…Children are particularly likely to process spoken information provided by mothers in these responses, because they relate to the focus of the child's attention and interest. Evidence supporting the importance of these responses is found in studies indicating that provision of contingent responses to children's gestures promotes increased infant gesture use (J. L. Miller & Lossia, 2013) and is positively correlated with later language outcomes for children who are TD (Goldin-Meadow et al, 2007;Masur, 1982;Wu & Gros-Louis, 2014). …”