Grant Details
Description
The overall goal of this research program is to investigate the role of
parent behavior on the development of repetitive arm, hand, and finger
movements in young infants-gestures that have recently been studied as
an analog to infant vocal babble. Specifically, this project will
investigate the responsiveness of parents to these repetitive infant
gestures and will experimentally test the role of parental reinforcement
on their production over time. Taking a Dynamic Systems approach, the
overall hypothesis is that children are born with innate predispositions
to produce behaviors that appear to adults as very speech- or sign-like-
repetitive vocalizations and gestures, respectively. As children mature,
they have an expanding "pool' of motor behaviors that may be used in
various contexts. In contexts where these behaviors are functional (e.g.
parents respond to and reinforce them), they are maintained and continue
to pull from the available pool. In contexts where they are not
functional, they do not change and eventually drop out. The present
project will consist of two longitudinal small-sample studies and one
large-sample study of adult responsiveness to repetitive infant gestures.
In Study 1 of the present project, the responses of hearing parents to
repetitive gestures produced by their hearing infants from 6 to 12 months
of age will be studied and compared to those of deaf, American Sign
Language (ASL)-signing parents of deaf infants. These data will provide
information about the natural responses of parents, both hearing and
deaf, to repetitive babble-like gestures produced by young infants. In
Study 2, the ability of hearing, nonsigning adults to identify repetitive
infant gestures from a "background' of ongoing infant motor activity will
be assessed. These data will provide new information about the potential
of hearing adults to recognize babble-like gestures in young infants. In
Study 3, the effect of parent reinforcement on repetitive infant gestures
will be experimentally tested by training hearing parents to provide
social reinforcement for nonreferential repetitive gestures produced by
their hearing infants between 6 and 16 months of age. These data will
inform our models of language learning by examining the role of parent
responsitivity in the development of a manual form of prelinguistic
babble and provide clinically relevant information about gestural parent-
child interaction-important to programs encouraging gestural
communication between hearing parents and deaf children.
Status | Finished |
---|---|
Effective start/end date | 01/1/97 → 12/31/99 |
Funding
- National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders
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