W2 Early social skills & language development ✅ Flashcards
What are two main stages of early social skills?
- Primary intersubjectivity
- Secondary intersubjectivity
What are the features of primary intersubjectivity?
- New borns: preference to faces and increased attention to faces & eye contact; mimic facial expressions.
- 3-4 months: produce vocalisations, imitate sounds.
- 6 months: only follow gaze after mutual eye contact
- ONLY dyadic interaction (e.g. baby and caregiver, baby and object).
- No assumption of the perspective of others.
- These interactions are not intentional -> random, mimicking, motivation to engage
What are the features of secondary intersubjectivity?
- Older infants (from ~9 months) can make social engagement cues: pointing, turn-taking, joint attention.
- Triadic interactions
- Intentional communication
- Infants start assuming perspectives.
Examples:
* Still face experiment: infants tried to repair interaction with caregiver when parent “freezes”
* Visual cliff: look to parents for emotional cue to respond (social referencing)
What are the 2 modes of communications infants display?
- Turn-taking (alternate vocalisation, few overlaps, proto-convosations)
- Joint attention: triadic interaction (shared awareness of the situation)
* sharing focus
* following
* directing attention
What is the evidence for turn-taking in infancy?
- Infants (from ~3 months): alternate vocalisation with caregivers
- 12 months: very few overlaps between speakers
- Infants then engaged in proto-conversation: mimicking actual convo gestures but gibberish (early vocalisation)
What are the evidence for sharing attention (joint attention) in infancy?
- The visual cliff: 9-month-olds infant use social referencing to respond to threatening situation
- Having topic comment - at 9 months old, interaction between caregiver, child and a toy (topic): chidren learn names for objects better when attending to naming
-> predict later language skills - Having routines built around the child (by caregiver): creating repetitive shared context
-> provide scaffold for language learning
-> routines differ in the type of words used
What are the evidence for sharing attention (following attention) in infancy?
- 9 months: can follow points in front of another person
- 12 months: begin to check back with pointer
- 14 months follows point across line of sight
- Understand communicative intention (from 14 months) -> follow pointing and gaze direction to retrieve object of interest
BUT!
* Infants aren’t tracking gaze specifically until 18 months (before they also check head movement)
-> 12-month-olds will follow head turn even when person is blinfolded BUT won’t if eyes are closed
-> 14 months old: will only follow head turns when eyes are visible
- Conflicting evidence (12 months olds will follow gaze behind a barrier -> they understand that gaze means see sth interesting)
What are the evidence for sharing attention (directing attention) in infancy?
- Two types of pointing:
* Imperative – to get adult to do something.
* Declarative – to direct adult’s attention to something. - Development:
* 9 months: child points then check caregiver attention
* 12 months: indicate when adult finds ‘wrong’ object AND respond negatively when attention is directed to the infant and not the object.
* 18 months: child checks for attention FIRST before pointing.
Conclusions and criticisms for pre-linguistic social development in infancy?
- Two main stages of social development
* Primary Intersubjectivity
* Secondary Intersubjectivity - Key communication skills
* Turn Taking
* Joint Attention - Development of social skills (gestures, proto-convo) AND understanding communicative intent (following gaze and pointing)
- Critical evaluation:
* Difficult to make claims about infants’ intents and thoughts
* Role of social skills in PRE- language acquisition?
What are the weaknesses/limitations of joint attention?
- Mother is solely responsible for shared attention.
- Such as: creating shared topic, provide context and words, monitoring child’s attention
- Child learn better when actively paying attention, than being directed to something
- Twins show language delay (less time spent in joint attention with mother)
What are the weaknesses/limitations of turn-taking in infancy?
- Caregivers play the main role in ensuring smooth interaction in early stages
- Not until 3 years old can children control turn-taking (interruptions)
- Difficult to establish mutually intentional.
What are examples of how children become intentional in communication? (Secondary intersubjectivity)
- active use of eye contact + pointing to direct attention
- vocalisation -> indicate goal
- waiting for response
- Persistence if not understood
