week 3 Flashcards
Prelinguistic Communication
Children start producing language around their first year:
First words ~ 12 months
Around 24 months they start combine 2-3 words
This is not when they start communicating with others
Lots of evidence that early forms of prelinguistic communication in infancy are related to language performance in early childhood
Prelinguistic Communication part 2
Dyadic exchange of eye gaze, vocalisations, gestures or facial expressions
Showing and giving gestures
Pointing emerges at 9-14 months
One of the most reliable findings in the area of early language is the strong correlation between social-communicative abilities such as pointing and early language
Mechanisms of Early Communication
Key features of developing communication skills:
Turn-taking
Ostension
Joint-attention and common ground
Turn-taking
Turn-taking is foundational to the infrastructure of human communication
Evidence from samples worldwide (Dingemanse & Liesenfeld, 2022) including sign-languages
Seemingly simple, minimising overlap and gaps involves is a cognitive challenge that have implications for language structure
Infants show turn-taking behaviour well before they start using language proficiently
Turn-taking part 2
Proto-conversations are the alternation of vocalization between carer and infant before language acquisition (Trevarthen, 1977)
Evidence for them in first weeks of life and continue to develop along with development of communication and language abilities
Early turn-taking is linked to later language proficiency
Turn-taking part 3
investigated caregiver-infant brain synchrony as a possible mechanism of early turn-taking in 4-6 month-old infants (N=55)
Brain-synchrony was associated with higher turn-taking frequency, but only at the start of the proto-conversation
Turn-taking is seen in a number of primate communication systems
Ostension
Communicators are invested in helping the recipient to understand, making it clear that you are trying to communicate is described as ostension
Suggested examples of ostensive behaviour in communication include eye contact or infant-directed speech, calling someone’s name
Several studies have shown that ostensive behaviors lead infants and children to interpret/infer actions as communicative (natural pedagogy, Senju & Csibra, 2008)
6-month-old infants are more likely to follow an actor’s gaze to a target when it is preceded by gaze or speech cues
Ostension part 2
There is an ongoing debate about whether there is evidence for ostension in other species
Kano et al. (2018) found that ostension increased attention overall, not to the target of communication
It is difficult to define the behaviours that can be considered ostension
Children often interpret behaviour as communicative even when there are no ostensive cues.
For example, 6-month-olds follow gaze in non-ostensive contexts too (Gredebäck et al. 2018)
To reconcile these findings, one interpretation is that ostensive cues are a sufficient but not necessary to infer communication
joint-attention
Thiele et al. (2023) used a violation of expectation paradigm and eye-tracking to investigate joint-attention in 9-month-old infants
Infants looked longer at identity change outcomes in the “eye contact” condition compared to the “no eye contact” condition. Responses to location changes were not influenced by the presence of eye contact.
They found similar results when infants observed joint-attention (eye-contact) as a third-party
Joint-Attention part 2
The goal of joint attention seems to be to share something with another person (Levinson et al. 2004)
This ability is associated with language ability at 2 years
Joint-attention without mutual eye-contact?
During video chat, pointing and eye-contact do not work in the same way
Myers et al. (2024) studied videos calls between infants and their grandparents during the pandemic
They found that grandparents could facilitate joint visual attention in some contexts and that there were developmental changes in how joint-attention was established
Joint-Attention
The motivation and ability to ‘share’ experiences with others is suggested to be a unique aspect of human social cognition and communication (Tomasello, 2022)
Great apes also point – though almost exclusively when interaction with humans – mainly to request items (imperative pointing)
Common Ground
Closely related to joint-attention is the concept of common ground
Common ground is knowledge or experience shared with another person
The most straightforward way in which information can be grounded is through direct social interaction (such as joint attention)
Bohn et al. (2018) found evidence that 12-month-olds adjust their pointing in line with shared common ground
common ground 2
Common ground is an important aspect of how we interpret communication (at all ages)
Evidence that infants make inferences about communication in the light of common ground
Children then continue to develop the skills that allow them to determine how information comes to be part of common ground
For example, reasoning about group-specific knowledge
There is evidence that apes may be able to use some form of common ground when communicating with others (humans in this case)
