Schroer Sara E, Yu Chen
University of Texas at Austin, Austin, Texas, USA.
Infancy. 2022 Nov;27(6):1154-1178. doi: 10.1111/infa.12500. Epub 2022 Sep 8.
Parental responsiveness to infant behaviors is a strong predictor of infants' language and cognitive outcomes. The mechanisms underlying this effect, however, are relatively unknown. We examined the effects of parent speech on infants' visual attention, manual actions, hand-eye coordination, and dyadic joint attention during parent-infant free play. We report on two studies that used head-mounted eye trackers in increasingly naturalistic laboratory environments. In Study 1, 12-to-24-month-old infants and their parents played on the floor of a seminaturalistic environment with 24 toys. In Study 2, a different sample of dyads played in a home-like laboratory with 10 toys and no restrictions on their movement. In both studies, we present evidence that responsive parent speech extends the duration of infants' multimodal attention. This social "boost" of parent speech impacts multiple behaviors that have been linked to later outcomes-visual attention, manual actions, hand-eye coordination, and joint attention. Further, the amount that parents talked during the interaction was negatively related to the effects of parent speech on infant attention. Together, these results provide evidence of a trade-off between quantity of speech and its effects, suggesting multiple pathways through which parents impact infants' multimodal attention to shape the moment-by-moment dynamics of an interaction.
父母对婴儿行为的反应能力是婴儿语言和认知发展结果的有力预测指标。然而，这种影响背后的机制相对尚不明确。我们研究了在亲子自由玩耍期间，父母的言语对婴儿视觉注意力、手部动作、手眼协调以及二元共同注意力的影响。我们报告了两项研究，这两项研究在越来越自然的实验室环境中使用了头戴式眼动仪。在研究1中，12至24个月大的婴儿及其父母在一个半自然环境的地板上玩耍，有24件玩具。在研究2中，另一组不同的亲子在一个类似家庭的实验室中玩耍，有10件玩具，且对他们的活动没有限制。在两项研究中，我们都提供了证据表明，反应性的父母言语延长了婴儿多模态注意力的持续时间。父母言语的这种社会性“促进”影响了多种与后期发展结果相关的行为——视觉注意力、手部动作、手眼协调和共同注意力。此外，父母在互动过程中说话的量与父母言语对婴儿注意力的影响呈负相关。总之，这些结果提供了言语量与其效果之间权衡的证据，表明父母影响婴儿多模态注意力以塑造互动逐刻动态的多种途径。
