Infants' learning of word–action relations and verb learning (Gogate & Maganti, 2017)

<div><b>Purpose: </b>This experiment examined English- or Spanish-learning preverbal (8–9 months,<i> n</i> = 32) and postverbal (12–14 months, <i>n</i> = 40) infants’ learning of word–action pairings prior to and after the transition to verb comprehension and its relation to naturally learned vocabulary.</div><div><b>Method: </b>Infants of both verbal levels were first habituated to 2 dynamic video displays of novel word–action pairings, the words /wem/ or /bæf/, spoken synchronously with an adult shaking or looming an object, and tested with interchanged (switched) versus same word–action pairings. Mothers of the postverbal infants were asked to report on their infants’ vocabulary on the MacArthur–Bates Communicative Development Inventories (Fenson et al., 1994).</div><div><b>Results: </b>The preverbal infants looked longer to the switched relative to same pairings, suggesting word–action mapping, but not the postverbal infants. Mothers of the postverbal infants reported a noun bias on the MacArthur–Bates Communicative Development Inventories; infants learned more nouns than verbs in the natural environment. Further analyses revealed marginal word–action mapping in postverbal infants who learned fewer nouns and only comprehended verbs (post–verb comprehension), but not in those who learned more nouns and also produced verbs (post–verb production).</div><div><b>Conclusions: </b>These findings on verb learning from inside and outside the laboratory suggest a developmental shift from domain-general to language-specific mechanisms. Long before they talk, infants learning a noun-dominant language learn synchronous word–action relations. As a postverbal language-specific noun bias develops, this learning temporarily diminishes.</div><div><br></div><div><b>Supplemental Materials S1, S2, and S3.</b> Eight dynamic video displays of four handheld objects—a fish, a dragonfly, a squiggly, or a lamb chop—looming or shaking in synchrony with a spoken word, /wem/ or /bæf/, were used. These displays were presented to English- and Spanish-learning infants in an identical manner in the experiment. On each display, a native speaker of Standard American English spoke one of the words once every 3 s while her visible hand (and forearm) held and moved one object each time she spoke the word. The words were elongated and exaggerated as in infant-directed speech and inflectionless akin to infants’ earliest spoken verbs. </div><div><br></div><div>Gogate, L., & Maganti, M. (2017). The origins of verb learning: Preverbal and postverbal infants' learning of word–action relations. <i>Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 60, </i>3538–3550<i>. </i>https://doi.org/10.1044/2017_JSLHR-L-17-0085</div

Cross-cultural evidence for multimodal motherese: Asian Indian mothers\u27 adaptive use of synchronous words and gestures

In a quasi-experimental study, 24 Asian Indian mothers were asked to teach novel (target) names for two objects and two actions to their children of three different levels of lexical mapping development: prelexical (5-8. months), early lexical (9-17. months), and advanced lexical (20-43. months). Target naming (n=1482) and non-target naming (other, n=2411) were coded for synchronous spoken words and object motion (multimodal motherese) and other naming styles. Indian mothers abundantly used multimodal motherese with target words to highlight novel word-referent relations, paralleling earlier findings from American mothers. They used it with target words more often for prelexical infants than for advanced lexical children and to name target actions later in children\u27s development. Unlike American mothers, Indian mothers also abundantly used multimodal motherese to name target objects later in children\u27s development. Finally, monolingual mothers who spoke a verb-dominant Indian language used multimodal motherese more often than bilingual mothers who also spoke noun-dominant English to their children. The findings suggest that within a dynamic and reciprocal mother-infant communication system, multimodal motherese adapts to unify novel words and referents across cultures. It adapts to children\u27s level of lexical development and to ambient language-specific lexical dominance hierarchies

Lending a voice to the expressions of children with cerebral palsy in an Indian context: ICF-CY based content-analysis of environmental factors influencing participation at home, school, and community settings

Introduction: To understand how to put the ICF-CY framework into practice within the Indian context, the study is a first-person account of how children with cerebral palsy voice their participation while performing self-care, leisure, and domestic/classroom/community activities at home, school and community settings. Patients and Methods: Using maximum variation sampling, N = 14 participants between the ages of 11- 22 years with ability to communicate, (male = 9 &amp; female = 5; urban = 8 &amp; rural = 6; public school = 5, private school = 5, special schools = 2, school dropouts = 2) from AADI (Action for Ability Development and Inclusion), New Delhi were interviewed. Data collection &amp; analysis: After transcribing the audio-taped interviews, coding was a structured, and objective process using the ICF-CY’s environmental factors (use of general products and technology, and support from family members) from chapter four of ICF-CY manual [see 3, pg 189-224]. Findings &amp; conclusion: The ICF-CY based content-analysis of children’s narration yielded three themes where children identified maternal support as the most significant environmental factor. They identified the facilitators and barriers and required a combination of environmental factors making their experiences of participation context-specific. Adopting ICF-CY framework in India is most needed

ManyBabies 5: A large-scale investigation of the proposed shift from familiarity preference to novelty preference in infant looking time Pre-data collection manuscript for peer-review The ManyBabies 5 Team

International audienceMuch of our basic understanding of cognitive and social processes in infancy relies on measures of looking time, and specifically on infants' visual preference for a novel or familiar stimulus. However, despite being the foundation of many behavioral tasks in infant research, the determinants of infants' visual preferences are poorly understood, and differences in the expression of preferences can be difficult to interpret. In this large-scale study, we test predictions from the Hunter and Ames model of infants' visual preferences. 1 We investigate the effects of three factors predicted by this model to determine infants' preference for novel versus familiar stimuli: age, stimulus familiarity, and stimulus complexity. Drawing from a large and diverse sample of infant participants (N = XX), this study will provide crucial empirical evidence for a robust and generalizable model of infant visual preferences, leading to a more solid theoretical foundation for understanding the mechanisms that underlie infants' responses in common behavioral paradigms. Moreover, our findings will guide future studies that rely on infants' visual preferences to measure cognitive and social processes

ManyBabies 5: A large-scale investigation of the proposed shift from familiarity preference to novelty preference in infant looking time

Much of our basic understanding of cognitive and social processes in infancy relies on measures of looking time, and specifically on infants’ visual preference for a novel or familiar stimulus. However, despite being the foundation of many behavioral tasks in infant research, the determinants of infants’ visual preferences are poorly understood, and differences in the expression of preferences can be difficult to interpret. In this large-scale study, we test predictions from the Hunter and Ames model of infants' visual preferences. We investigate the effects of three factors predicted by this model to determine infants’ preference for novel versus familiar stimuli: age, stimulus familiarity, and stimulus complexity. Drawing from a large and diverse sample of infant participants (minimum expected sample size N = 1,280), this study aims to provide empirical evidence for a robust and generalizable model of infant visual preferences, leading to a more solid theoretical foundation for understanding the mechanisms that underlie infants’ responses in common behavioral paradigms. Moreover, we hope that our findings will guide future studies that rely on infants' visual preferences to measure cognitive and social processes