Comparing Me to You: Comparison Between Novel and Familiar Goal-Directed Actions Facilitates Goal Extraction and Imitation

Recognizing the goals of others' actions is critical for much of human development and social life. Origins of this knowledge exist in the first year and are a function of both acting as an intentional agent and observing movement cues in actions. In this dissertation, I explore a new mechanism I believe plays an important role in infants' understanding of novel actions---comparison. In four studies, I examine how the opportunity to compare a familiar action with a novel, tool use action (through physical alignment of the two actions) helps 7- and 10-month-old infants extract and imitate the goal of a tool use action. In Studies 1 and 2, 7-month-old infants given the chance to compare their own reach for a toy with an experimenter's reach using a claw later imitated the goals of an experimenter's tool use actions. In contrast, infants who engaged with the claw, were familiarized with the claw's causal properties, learned the associations between claw and toys, or interacted in a socially contingent manner with the experimenter using the claw did not later imitate the experimenter's goals. Study 3 replicated the finding that engagement in physical alignment facilitated goal extraction and imitation and indicated that this was true for older infants (10-month-olds). It also demonstrated that observation of the same physical alignment did not lead to goal imitation at this age. Finally, Study 4 revealed that 10-month-old infants could learn about the goals of novel actions through the observation of physical alignment when a cue to focus on the goal of the two actions was presented during the alignment process (i.e., a verbal label), indicating that infants gained a conceptual representation of the goal and used structure mapping to extract the common goal between actions. Infants who heard a non-label vocalization during the observation of physical alignment did not later imitate the experimenter's goals. The nature, breadth, and implications of these findings are discussed. Together, these findings indicate that infants can extract the goal-relation of a novel action through comparison processes; comparison could thus have a broad impact on the development of action knowledge

Matter’s Influence Child’s On the Speech Development in Kenya

Mothers have key roles in their children’s speech development.Sibling a child true love is an essential step in speech development. Simply talking to a child and getting a conversation going by means of emotional expression, gestures and sounds equally important while doing this, it is necessarily to follow the child’s lead signs, expressions, gestures, emotions, praising and appreciating what the child’s manages to do and helping him or her to focus on his or her attention, thus sharing the child’s experiences. Mothers therefore, play a big role in helping their children to learn rules, limits values and more importantly develop their speech in a natural manner

Evaluation of a Computer-Based Observer-Effect Training on Mothers\u27 Vocal Imitation of Their Infant

Infants begin to learn important skills, such as contingency learning, social referencing, and joint attention through everyday interactions with their environment. When infants learn that their behavior produces a change in the environment (e.g., attention from others), infants engage in behavior that produces that effect (e.g., increases in smiling sustained engagement. When mothers and other caregivers respond immediately to infant behavior, they help their infant learn that the infant’s own behavior is effective, producing a change in the environment. The current investigation evaluated the effect of a computer-based training that aimed at teaching mothers to play a vocal-imitation contingency-learning game. The training included observer-effect methodology, meaning the mothers engaged in observation and evaluation of other mothers engaging in vocal imitation but did not themselves receive any direct coaching or feedback. All mothers completed the training during one session and in less than 45 min. Results indicate that all mothers increased their use of vocal imitation post training and maintained their performance at a two-week follow-up. Results are discussed in terms of how computer training may facilitate dissemination of responsive caregiver training

Development of eye gaze and point following and its relation to word learning

Socio-pragmatic cues are essential for supporting early word learning. Children use social cues, such as eye gaze and pointing to isolate and learn about referents in their environment. To what extent might individual variability in children’s ability to capitalize on these word-learning strategies relate to the well-documented differences in vocabulary development associated with socioeconomic status? To answer this question, we asked 170 2.5- to 3.5-year-olds to identify the referents of novel words based on cues from either the experimenter’s gaze alone, or that gaze in combination with a pointing gesture. We found that socioeconomic status correlates with the use of eye gaze and point following for learning new words. Further, children from higher socioeconomic status households more reliably used these cues. The results of this study could have implications for our understanding of the differences in vocabulary development, as well as on how to best intervene in children’s early word-learning skills.Psycholog

Quasi-experimental design and outcomes of a graduate clinician and caregiver-infant coaching intervention in a university speech-language pathology program

Infants are born ready to learn language as one of their most critical developmental tasks, yet infants subject to environmental risk factors related to poverty and low maternal education have been shown to lag behind their peers in language development as early as 8 months of age. Research also indicates the quality of an infant’s language environment can significantly diminish the effects of these risk factors. This quasi-experimental clinical research study explored the effects of a preventive caregiver-infant coaching intervention delivered by graduate student clinicians in a university speech-language pathology program. Developed based on a systematic review of preventive programs for caregivers-infants, the Facilitating Infant Responsiveness to Stimulate Talking (FIRST) Program provided 36 caregiver-infant dyads with education and experience in evidence-based practices known to support prelinguistic development and provided clinical experience for 70 graduate clinicians in preventive education, infant interaction, and caregiver coaching. Offered to parents of any socioeconomic status with infants ages 6- to 12- months-old, the intervention was hypothesized to be of particular benefit to the 14 participating caregiver-infant dyads from low-socioeconomic (low-SES) backgrounds. The intervention, which combined the individual attention of home visit coaching with peer-group instructive modeling, was offered as an 8-session program (2019), a 1-session program (2020), and a 4-session program (2021). A control group participated in all outcome measurements timepoints (pre-test, post-test, and a 3-month follow-up) prior to receiving a delayed session of intervention. Scores on measures of caregiver knowledge and beliefs about early language development significantly increased for the 8- and 4-session participants. Time spent in responsive, turn-taking communication patterns significantly increased for 8-session caregivers and infants. Infant standardized expressive communication scores increased significantly in all intervention conditions. Low-SES participant scores on multiple measures of language learning showed boosts not observed in mid-high SES scores. Graduate clinician confidence in both caregiver coaching and infant assessment showed higher gains for higher numbers of intervention sessions. Overall outcomes reveal a promising preventive model for clinical education in speech-language pathology that benefits caregivers, infants, and students and should be replicable in other university settings and communities

A Caregiver\u27s Perceptions and Practices in Relation to her Speech to an Under 2-year-old age Group in a Childcare Centre

The objective of this study was to investigate what a caregiver sees as her role in relation to young children\u27s oral language development. This study examines her perceptions and beliefs, as well as the various activities that she thinks facilitates language development with under 2-year-old children. The main focus of the study is her language interactions with the children while they took part in three activities. The investigation involved qualitative case study research to collect the oral language interactions between the caregiver and the young children and the activities she provides. The features of the caregiver\u27s speech to young children were identified from the research literature. The study was carried out in a community based childcare centre with one caregiver and five under 2-year-old children who were in her care. Results from the investigation suggest that the caregiver’s perceptions and beliefs, the activities she provides and her oral language interactions with the children have the potential to facilitate the children\u27s language development in this childcare centre

The Role of Saliency in Learning First Words

In word learning, one key accomplishment is the reference, that is, the linking of a word to its referent. According to classical theories, the term reference captures a mental event: A person uses a word to mentally recall a concept of an entity (an object or event) in order to bring it into the mental focus of an interaction. The developmental literature proposes different approaches regarding how children accomplish this link. Although researchers agree that multiple processes (within and across phonological, lexical, and semantic areas) are responsible for word learning, recent research has highlighted the role of saliency and perception as crucial factors in the early phases of word learning. Generally speaking, whereas some approaches to solving the reference problem attribute a greater role to the referent’s properties being salient, others emphasize the social context that is needed to select the appropriate referent. In this review, we aim to systematize terminology and propose that the reason why assessments of the impact of saliency on word learning are controversial is that definitions of the term saliency reveal different weightings of the importance that either perceptual or social stimuli have for the learning process. We propose that defining early word learning in terms of paying attention to salient stimuli is too narrow. Instead, we emphasize that a new link between a word and its referent will succeed if a stimulus is relevant for the child

Young Children\u27s Understanding of the Relationship Between Conventionality and Communication

This dissertation explores children\u27s understanding of the conventionality of language, the notion that shared knowledge of the meanings of linguistic symbols enables communication using those symbols. Three studies investigate whether monolingual children recognize that different speakers share knowledge of lexical conventions, in this case the labels for objects, independent of children\u27s own knowledge of those labels. Further, children\u27s ability to use evidence of shared conventional knowledge when reasoning about communicative interactions is tested using a novel third-party communication task. Results indicate that three-year-old children track consistent labeling of novel objects across different speakers, and infer underlying shared knowledge of object labels across consistent speakers. Further, under supportive conditions, three-year-old children infer that inconsistent speakers know different labels for the same object, overriding their own default bias to assume that everyone will use the same label for an object when given evidence to think otherwise. Finally, four-year-old children can reason about communicative interactions in an unfamiliar language, recognizing that a bilingual speaker intends to direct her speech toward a particular monolingual speaker, depending on which language she uses: e.g., toward another Spanish speaker when speaking in Spanish). This result suggests that four-year-olds understand that shared knowledge of a particular language enables communication between those speakers, and recognize the communicative efficacy of an unfamiliar language. Three-year-old children\u27s difficulty with this communicative task suggests that children\u27s conception of conventionality and its role in communication becomes enriched across early childhood

Social learning mechanisms of knowledge exchange:Active communication, information seeking and information transmission in infancy

Children are active participants in the social knowledge exchange process, but little is known about how this exchange manifests in the first two years of life. This thesis explores active social learning strategies underlying both knowledge acquisition and knowledge transmission in infants aged 11-24 months. Comprising three experimental chapters, this thesis demonstrates infants’ sensitivity to the informative potential of their social partners and their epistemic value, their active and selective information seeking in situations of epistemic uncertainty, and their preferential information transmission based on a combination of social and non-social factors. Experimental Chapter 1 shows that 11-month-olds communicatively respond to their social partners following epistemic violation of expectation events and do so based on the social partner’s epistemic status. Experimental Chapter 2 demonstrates that 12-month-olds selectively solicit epistemic information from more knowledgeable social partners when facing a situation of referential uncertainty. Experimental Chapter 3 reports that 24-month-olds’ propensity for active information transmission to less knowledgeable social partners is modulated by information complexity but not the pedagogical context of information acquisition. Overall, this thesis contributes to the literature on cognitive development of social learning strategies for acquisition and transmission of knowledge, with a special emphasis on elucidating the ontogeny of active interrogative communication skills. The overarching conclusion stemming from this work highlights that far from being passive receptacles of knowledge, infants actively partake in the bi-directional process of social knowledge exchange

Incorporating Memory Processes in the Study of Early Language Acquisition

Critical to the learning of any language is the learning of the words in that language. Therefore, an extensive amount of research in language development has examined how infants learn the words of their language so rapidly. In particular, research on statistical learning has suggested that sequential statistics may play a vital role in the discovery of candidate words, that become available to be mapped to meaning. One important limitation of this previous research is the lack of attention given to the memory processes involved in statistical word learning. Thus, the current set of experiments examine the availability of statistically defined words as object labels after a delay. To examine whether statistics found in speech supports infants’ memory for label-object associations, in Experiment 1, 22- to 24-month-old infants were presented with 12 Italian sentences that contained 2 high transitional probability words (HTP) and 2 low transitional probability words (LTP). Ten-minute after familiarization, using a Looking-While-Listening procedure (Fernald et al., 2008), infants were trained and tested on 2 HTP and 2 LTP label-object associations. Results revealed that infants were able to learn HTP but not LTP words, suggesting that HTP words make better labels for objects after a minimal delay. Experiment 2 examined infants’ memory for meaning representations that are statistically defined or not. Stimuli and procedure were identical to that of Experiment 1, except that the 10-minute delay was implemented after the referent training phase instead of after the familiarization phase. Infants in Experiment 2 were able to remember both HTP and LTP words when tested following a 10-min delay. Together, the findings suggest that statistical learning facilitates future word learning