Maternal naming of object wholes versus parts to preverbal infants: A fine-grained analysis of scaffolding at 6–8 months

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

“…The two action names were “pru” depicting a leaping action performed with a stuffed teddy bear, and “flo” depicting a shaking action performed with a stuffed fish (Figure 1). The actions were similar to other actions parents would naturally perform with objects for their infants (Gogate et al, 2013; Matatyaho & Gogate, 2008). The words were in the mothers’ phonotactic repertoire; they knew English and at least one Indian language.…”

“…Mothers abundantly used verbal labels simultaneously with gestures to show novel objects or to demonstrate novel actions in teaching contexts. Multimodal motherese also occurs naturally when mothers name novel objects to their infants in non-teaching contexts (Gogate et al, 2013). Mothers use synchrony to transfer knowledge - to foreground word-referent relations and reduce referential ambiguity for their word learning novice.…”

“…Multimodal motherese is not restricted to explicit teaching contexts (Björkenstam & Wiren, 2012; Tamis-LeMonda, Song, Smith Leavell, et al, 2012). Caucasian and Hispanic-American mothers naturally use multimodal motherese during play with their 6- to 8-month-olds infants using toys even when not explicitly asked to teach names for novel objects (Gogate, Maganti, & Laing, 2013). …”

“…To date, however, we do not know if multimodal motherese, the synchronized naming and moving of objects to highlight word-referent relations, is widespread, and if mothers in non-western cultures tailor their naming style to their child’s level of lexical development as they do in western cultures. Barring a few studies of Japanese mothers’ labeling to 2-year-olds (Yoshida, 2012; Imai & Gentner, 1997; Kobayashi, 1997), investigations of maternal labeling to infants and young children are primarily restricted to western populations (Gogate et al, 2000; Gogate et al, 2006; Gogate et al, 2013; Mazur, 1997; Messer, 1978; Zukow-Goldring, 1997; also Tamis-LeMonda et al, 2012). Of the studies of Japanese mothers’ labeling to their toddlers, only one reports that mothers synchronize their verb naming with their actions (Yoshida, 2012), but not whether mothers tailor its use to their toddlers’ lexical development.…”

Maternal object naming is less adapted to preterm infants’ than to term infants’ word mapping

“…The digitized (Final Cut Pro) semi‐structured play episodes were coded frame‐by‐frame for properties of maternal target‐naming and gestures by trained coders. Each target object naming instance was coded as synchronous if name and object motion temporally overlapped in onset, offset, and duration or had a small discrepancy in the onset or offset (<150 ms; Gogate, et al, , ). Digitization enabled temporal discrepancy estimation (in frames) in the onset or offset of word utterance in relation to object motion.…”