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Multimodal infant-directed communication: how caregivers combine tactile and linguistic cues*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 August 2016

RANA ABU-ZHAYA ,
AMANDA SEIDL  and
ALEJANDRINA CRISTIA
RANA ABU-ZHAYA*
Affiliation:
Purdue University
AMANDA SEIDL
Affiliation:
Purdue University
ALEJANDRINA CRISTIA
Affiliation:
Laboratoire de Sciences Cognitives et Psycholinguistique, CNRS, DEC-ENS, EHESS
*
[*]Address for correspondence: Rana Abu-Zhaya, Purdue University, Lyles-Porter Hall, West Lafayette, IN 47907. e-mail: [email protected]
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Abstract

Both touch and speech independently have been shown to play an important role in infant development. However, little is known about how they may be combined in the input to the child. We examined the use of touch and speech together by having mothers read their 5-month-olds books about body parts and animals. Results suggest that speech+touch multimodal events are characterized by more exaggerated touch and speech cues. Further, our results suggest that maternal touches are aligned with speech and that mothers tend to touch their infants in locations that are congruent with names of body parts. Thus, our results suggest that tactile cues could potentially aid both infant word segmentation and word learning.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 44 , Issue 5 , September 2017 , pp. 1088 - 1116
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Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2016 

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