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Attention to the mouth and gaze following in infancy predict language development*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 November 2014

ELENA J. TENENBAUM ,
DAVID M. SOBEL ,
STEPHEN J. SHEINKOPF ,
BERTRAM F. MALLE  and
JAMES L. MORGAN
ELENA J. TENENBAUM*
Affiliation:
Brown Center for the Study of Children at Risk at Women and Infants Hospital Providence, RI
DAVID M. SOBEL
Affiliation:
Department of Cognitive, Linguistic and Psychological Sciences, Brown University, Providence, RI
STEPHEN J. SHEINKOPF
Affiliation:
Brown Center for the Study of Children at Risk at Women and Infants Hospital Providence, RI and Department of Psychiatry, Brown University, Providence, RI
BERTRAM F. MALLE
Affiliation:
Department of Cognitive, Linguistic and Psychological Sciences, Brown University, Providence, RI
JAMES L. MORGAN
Affiliation:
Department of Cognitive, Linguistic and Psychological Sciences, Brown University, Providence, RI
*
Address for correspondence: Elena Tenenbaum, Brown Center for the Study of Children at Risk, Women and Infants Hospital, 50 Holden St., Providence RI 02906. e-mail: [email protected]
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Abstract

We investigated longitudinal relations among gaze following and face scanning in infancy and later language development. At 12 months, infants watched videos of a woman describing an object while their passive viewing was measured with an eye-tracker. We examined the relation between infants' face scanning behavior and their tendency to follow the speaker's attentional shift to the object she was describing. We also collected language outcome measures on the same infants at 18 and 24 months. Attention to the mouth and gaze following at 12 months both predicted later productive vocabulary. The results are discussed in terms of social engagement, which may account for both attentional distribution and language onset. We argue that an infant's inherent interest in engaging with others (in addition to creating more opportunities for communication) leads infants to attend to the most relevant information in a social scene and that this information facilitates language learning.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 42 , Issue 6 , November 2015 , pp. 1173 - 1190
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Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2014 

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Footnotes

[*]

This work was supported by NIH grant HD32005 to JLM and a graduate research award from the Brain Sciences Program at Brown University to EJT and DMS, and an Autism Speaks postdoctoral fellowship (grant 7897) to EJT and SJS. Thanks go to Lori Rolfe for substantial effort in recruiting and testing, Halie Rando for her face, and the participant families for all of their efforts. We also thank Scott P. Johnson at UCLA for the attention attracting video used to calibrate the infants in this study.

References

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