Journal ArticleDOI
Social Cognition, joint attention and communicative Competence from 9 to 15 months of age
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It was found that two measures--the amount of time infants spent in joint engagement with their mothers and the degree to which mothers used language that followed into their infant's focus of attention--predicted infants' earliest skills of gestural and linguistic communication.Abstract:
At around 1 year of age, human infants display a number of new behaviors that seem to indicate a newly emerging understanding of other persons as intentional beings whose attention to outside objects may be shared, followed into, and directed in various ways. These behaviors have mostly been studied separately. In the current study, we investigated the most important of these behaviors together as they emerged in a single group of 24 infants between 9 and 15 months of age. At each of seven monthly visits, we measured joint attentional engagement, gaze and point following, imitation of two different kinds of actions on objects, imperative and declarative gestures, and comprehension and production of language. We also measured several nonsocial-cognitive skills as a point of comparison. We report two studies. The focus of the first study was the initial emergence of infants' social-cognitive skills and how these skills are related to one another developmentally. We found a reliable pattern of emergence: Infants progressed from sharing to following to directing others' attention and behavior. The nonsocial skills did not emerge predictably in this developmental sequence. Furthermore, correlational analyses showed that the ages of emergence of all pairs of the social-cognitive skills or their components were inter-related. The focus of the second study was the social interaction of infants and their mothers, especially with regard to their skills of joint attentional engagement (including mothers' use of language to follow into or direct infants' attention) and how these skills related to infants' early communicative competence. Our measures of communicative competence included not only language production, as in previous studies, but also language comprehension and gesture production. It was found that two measures--the amount of time infants spent in joint engagement with their mothers and the degree to which mothers used language that followed into their infant's focus of attention--predicted infants' earliest skills of gestural and linguistic communication. Results of the two studies are discussed in terms of their implications for theories of social-cognitive development, for theories of language development, and for theories of the process by means of which human children become fully participating members of the cultural activities and processes into which they are born.read more
Citations
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Journal ArticleDOI
Why is joint attention a pivotal skill in autism
TL;DR: In this article, concurrent and longitudinal associations between joint attention and other social communication abilities measured in a sample of infants with autism and related pervasive developmental disorders at age 20 months, and language and symptom severity at age 42 months, were examined.
Journal ArticleDOI
The development of gaze following and its relation to language.
TL;DR: Results showed a strong positive correlation between gaze-following behavior at 10-11 months and subsequent language scores at 18 months, and implications for social cognition are discussed in light of the developmental shift in gaze following between 9 and 11 months of age.
Journal ArticleDOI
Individual Differences and the Development of Joint Attention in Infancy
Peter Clive Mundy,Jessica Block,Christine E F Delgado,Yuly B. Pomares,Amy Vaughan Van Hecke,Meaghan V. Parladé +5 more
TL;DR: The development of joint attention in 95 infants assessed between 9 and 18 months of age was examined, and 12-month RJA and 18-month IJA predicted 24-month language after controlling for general aspects of cognitive development.
Journal ArticleDOI
The Role of Language in the Development of False Belief Understanding: A Training Study
TL;DR: Children showed most improvement in a condition using both perspective-shifting discourse and sentential complement syntax, suggesting that each of these types of linguistic experience plays an independent role in the ontogeny of false belief understanding.
Journal ArticleDOI
Early Predictors of Communication Development in Young Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder: Joint Attention, Imitation, and Toy Play
TL;DR: Two skills, initiating protodeclarative joint attention and immediate imitation, were most strongly associated with language ability at age 3–4 years, whereas toy play and deferred imitation were the best predictors of rate of communication development from age 4 to 6.5 years.
References
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