Eeva Klintfors

Assessing language acquisition from parent-child interaction: An event-related potential study on perception of audio-visual cues in infancy

This paper promotes a theory-driven model development of parent-child interaction. In our project, we identify, test, and simulate some of the fundamental components of speech, gestures, and social-emotional behaviors and the consequences they might have on child language development. Our theoretical position is part of the connectionist tradition; language acquisition is described to be an emergent consequence of the interplay between the infant and the ambient linguistic environment, including sensory information of all modalities. It is well known that speech comprehension and production are significantly influenced by the presence of co-speech gestures. These gestures may be articulatory in nature or hand/beat co-gestures that keep the rhythm of speech. However, since the extent of this integrated relationship is difficult to determine from behavioral research solely, studies addressing neural mechanisms that underlie cognitive processes and behaviors are of importance. This paper reports an electroen...

Assessing language acquisition from parent-child interaction: An event-related potential study on perception of intonation contours in infancy

The aim of this paper is to present our multidisciplinary project to study parent-child interaction. The goal of the project is to identify, test, and simulate components of child and adult speech and gestures and the consequences they might have on child language acquisition. Since typical parent-child interaction is built upon both interlocutors’ intention-reading, responsiveness to joint-attention, and imitation of speech/gestures, we make video recordings along with recordings of speech data to grasp the integration of semantic and pragmatic aspects of language acquisition. The understanding of parent-child interaction benefits further from information on brain activation involved in speech processing. As a first step to achieve the project goals, an electroencephalography/event-related potential (EEG/ERP) study exploring children’s early perception of intonation contours involved in human interactions was performed. This paper discusses the characteristics of integration of multimodal social-emotiona...