Joint-attentional states and lexical acquisition at 18 months.

Abstract

Two groups of 18-month-old infants were observed during a relatively natural play session with an adult experimenter and several toys. A novel object associated with one of the toys was labeled a dodo by the experimenter using either an attention-following strategy (i.e., introducing the label when the infant was focused on the dodo object) or an attention-switching strategy (i.e., introducing the label when the infant was focused on an alternative object). With factors such as frequency of exposure to the object label and infant compliance equivalent across the groups, infants in the attention-following procedure were more likely to correctly identify the dodo object in a subsequent comprehension task. These experimental data corroborate previous correlational observations suggesting that early lexical development is facilitated during interactions in which the caregiver is following rather than leading the infant's focus of attention.

The development of infant discrimination of affect in multimodal and unimodal stimulation: The role of intersensory redundancy.

“…Learning about information that can be specified in multiple sense modalities (involving dimensions such as time, space, or intensity) will likely be advantaged and emerge earlier in development when it is available in multimodal stimulation rather than in unimodal stimulation. Research in the area of joint attention, a potential precursor for social referencing and language development (Dunham, Dunham, & Curwin, 1993;Morales, Mundy, & Rojas, 1998;Tomasello & Farrar, 1986), provides some support for this generalization. For example, infants' ability to follow gaze toward a target, even if it is outside their immediate visual field, is facilitated when the shift in eye gaze is coordinated with gesture and vocal behavior as compared with eye gaze alone (e.g., Corkum & Moore, 1998;Deák, Flom, & Pick, 2000;Flom, Deák, Pick, & Phill, 2004;Flom & Pick, 2007;Moore, Angelopoulos, & Bennett, 1997).…”

Situated sentence processing: The coordinated interplay account and a neurobehavioral model

“…Indeed, Knoeferle and Crocker (2006) conjecture that there may be a developmental basis for this synchronization of language and visual attention, arising from the important role that the immediate environment plays as a child learns to ground concepts with visual referents during language acquisition. There is by now general acceptance of the importance that visual grounding of language plays during language acquisition, with experimental findings suggesting that the influence of nonlinguistic information (e.g., objects and events) on language acquisition is highly dependent on the time-lock between a child's attention to, and child-directed speech about, these objects and events (Dunham, Dunham, & Curwin, 1993;Harris, Jones, Brookes, & Grant, 1986;Hennon, Chung, & Brown, 2000;Pruden, Hirsh-Pasek, Golinkoff, & Hennon, 2007;Smith, 2000).…”

Maternal verbal responsiveness and directiveness: consistency, stability, and relations to child early linguistic development

“…Hoff and Naigles (2002) added that by the time children have become competent at staying engaged and following their mothers' focus, individual differences in maternal contingency decrease in importance. However, in a study by Dunham, Dunham and Curwin (1993), joint attention parameters were manipulated in order to determine their effects on the ability of children to learn new words at the age of 1;6. Significant learning advantage for the attention-following versus attention-redirecting context was still found at that age.…”