Social coordination in toddler's word learning: interacting systems of perception and action

Abstract

We measured turn-taking in terms of hand and head movements and asked if the global rhythm of the participants' body activity relates to word learning. Six dyads composed of parents and toddlers (M = 18 months) interacted in a tabletop task wearing motion-tracking sensors on their hands and head. Parents were instructed to teach the labels of 10 novel objects and the child was later tested on a name-comprehension task. Using dynamic time warping, we compared the motion data of all body-part pairs, within and between partners. For every dyad, we also computed an overall measure of the quality of the interaction, that takes into consideration the state of interaction when the parent uttered an object label and the overall smoothness of the turn-taking. The overall interaction quality measure was correlated with the total number of words learned.In particular, head movements were inversely related to other partner's hand movements, and the degree of bodily coupling of parent and toddler predicted the words that children learned during the interaction. The implications of joint body dynamics to understanding joint coordination of activity in a social interaction, its scaffolding effect on the child's learning and its use in the development of artificial systems are discussed.

How relevant is social interaction in second language learning?

“…The coordinative phenomena we describe above could play a role in this process, maximizing the efficiency of the conversation and consequently facilitating the focusing of attention: this proposal has been made for word learning in toddlers. Indeed, it has been shown that in toddler-adult dyads, the number of new words learnt by the toddlers is proportional to the quality of the synchronization during the interaction with the caregiver (Pereira et al, 2008). Again, it is important to note that the case of word learning is not dissimilar in adults and infants, and so one may expect facilitating factors (such as the focusing of attention driven by synchronization) to play a role in word learning for both adults and children.…”

Video Based Children's Social Behavior Classification in Peer-Play Scenarios

“…There are also some studies on infants' behavior analysis [16][5] [15]. In these studies, the motion of infants and adults (parents or caregiver) are usually tracked and detected by sensors.…”

“…In recent years, many methods have been proposed to analyze human behavior automatically [8] [19] [4] and there are an increasing number of studies focused on computational analysis of infants' behavior [16][5] [15].…”

Co-development of information transfer within and between infant and caregiver

“…Yu, Smith, and colleagues [7], [8] have investigated multimodal information transfer in infant-caregiver interaction. They examined how speech, visual attention, and body movement of participants were orchestrated while a caregiver was teaching a label of a new object to an infant.…”