Igualada Alfonso, Bosch Laura, Prieto Pilar
Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Spain.
Universitat de Barcelona, Spain; Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour, UB, Spain.
Infant Behav Dev. 2015 May;39:42-52. doi: 10.1016/j.infbeh.2015.02.004. Epub 2015 Mar 7.
The present study investigated the degree to which an infants' use of simultaneous gesture-speech combinations during controlled social interactions predicts later language development. Nineteen infants participated in a declarative pointing task involving three different social conditions: two experimental conditions (a) available, when the adult was visually attending to the infant but did not attend to the object of reference jointly with the child, and (b) unavailable, when the adult was not visually attending to neither the infant nor the object; and (c) a baseline condition, when the adult jointly engaged with the infant's object of reference. At 12 months of age measures related to infants' speech-only productions, pointing-only gestures, and simultaneous pointing-speech combinations were obtained in each of the three social conditions. Each child's lexical and grammatical output was assessed at 18 months of age through parental report. Results revealed a significant interaction between social condition and type of communicative production. Specifically, only simultaneous pointing-speech combinations increased in frequency during the available condition compared to baseline, while no differences were found for speech-only and pointing-only productions. Moreover, simultaneous pointing-speech combinations in the available condition at 12 months positively correlated with lexical and grammatical development at 18 months of age. The ability to selectively use this multimodal communicative strategy to engage the adult in joint attention by drawing his attention toward an unseen event or object reveals 12-month-olds' clear understanding of referential cues that are relevant for language development. This strategy to successfully initiate and maintain joint attention is related to language development as it increases learning opportunities from social interactions.
本研究调查了婴儿在受控社交互动中使用同步手势-言语组合对其后期语言发展的预测程度。19名婴儿参与了一项陈述性指物任务，该任务涉及三种不同的社交条件：两种实验条件，（a）可得条件，即成人在视觉上关注婴儿，但不与孩子共同关注指称对象；（b）不可得条件，即成人既不在视觉上关注婴儿，也不关注指称对象；以及（c）基线条件，即成人与婴儿共同关注指称对象。在12个月大时，在这三种社交条件下分别获取了与婴儿仅言语表达、仅指物手势以及同步指物-言语组合相关的测量数据。通过家长报告对每个孩子在18个月大时的词汇和语法输出进行了评估。结果显示社交条件与交流产出类型之间存在显著交互作用。具体而言，与基线相比，只有同步指物-言语组合在可得条件下的频率增加，而仅言语表达和仅指物手势则没有差异。此外，12个月大时在可得条件下的同步指物-言语组合与18个月大时的词汇和语法发展呈正相关。通过将成人的注意力引向一个看不见的事件或物体，选择性地使用这种多模态交流策略来使成人参与共同关注的能力，揭示了12个月大的婴儿对与语言发展相关的指称线索有清晰的理解。这种成功发起和维持共同关注的策略与语言发展相关，因为它增加了社交互动中的学习机会。
