Luigia Camaioni

A Comparison of the Gestural Communication of Apes and Human Infants.

The naturally occurring gestures of chimpanzees and prelinguistic human infants are compared. Considered as special cases are apes raised by humans as they gesture to humans, and children with autism. Overall, the most important differences between the gestures of typically developing children and the gestures of individuals from the other three groups concern: (1) their predominant use of triadic, distal gestures; (2) their extensive use of declarative gestures, and (3) their use of imitative learning in acquiring some gestures (symbolic or referential), which implies that the gestures are understood as bi-directional communicative conventions. These differences all derive from the uniquely human form of social cognition (i.e., knowledge of other minds) that first emerges during the 2nd year of life and that enables human infants to understand other persons as intentional agents with whom they may share experience. Implications for the origins and evolution of human culture and language are discussed.

A parent report instrument for early language assessment

A structured questionnaire for evaluating the level of communicative and linguistic development at 12, 16 and 20 months of age respectively was administered to the parents of 23 children for three different assessments. For a subsample of 14 subjects the questionnaire was filled in by the parents and by a trained observer in a two-hour observational session at home. The aim of the study was two-fold: (a) to verify the validity of the instrument and specifically its predictive validity; (b) to verify the reliability of the information given by parents through a direct comparison between the data in the questionnaire filled in by the parents and the data in the same questionnaire filled in by the observer. Results show that, on the basis of measures reported at 12 months, the instrument can predict linguistic development at 20 months as evaluated by means of a Vocabulary Checklist. Furthermore, the pattern of communicative and linguistic development reported by parents is consistent with that reported by the observer. Finally, the samples lexical development exhibits a wide range of individual variation, with lexicons consisting of about 8 to 628 different words at 20 months of age.

Cognitive socialization by computer games in two cultures: inductive discovery or mastery of an iconic code

Abstract This research is a cross-cultural and experimental examination of computer games as cultural tools of cognitive socialization. It also investigates the cognitive processes involved in mastering computer games. The research took place in two countries, the United States and Italy, which differ in their exposure and attitudes to computer technology. Exposure to computer technology, either over the long term, as a member of a culture, or in the short term of our experimental computer game treatments, was associated with greater skill in decoding scientific-technical information graphically represented on a computer screen and with a preference for iconic diagrams, rather than the written word, in communicating this information.

RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN COGNITION, COMMUNICATION, AND QUALITY OF ATTACHMENT

This chapter focuses on relationships between cognition, communication, and quality of attachment. Social and cognitive development are inextricably intertwined: Without being able to interpret the behavior of social companions, one cannot respond to them appropriately; and interpreting the meaning of behavior in turn requires cognitive processes at some level. Attachment theory emphasizes the role of the mother as a source of security. The infants propensity to seek proximity to the mother or other major caregiver—at first excercised by signaling behavior and later by locomotor following and approach—is seen as fulfilling a protective function. A curious infant who has a tendency to remain in fairly close proximity to the mother is less likely to come to harm than an infant who pays no heed to the whereabouts of his or her caregiver. For infants whose mothers vary greatly in how effectively and how intensively they stimulate their infants verbally and/or through play with toys and other interesting objects, the maternal input may overshadow gains which the infants may also be making through their own discoveries.

Chapter 3 – COGNITION AND COMMUNICATION FROM NINE TO THIRTEEN MONTHS: CORRELATIONAL FINDINGS

Publisher Summary The correlational results for gestural development suggest that there is a Gestural Complex developing between 9 and 13 months, reflected in giving, showing, communicative pointing, and ritual requests. If one contrasts the measures that do correlate with this complex with the measures that do not, it seems that the Gestural Complex involves: (1) the use of conventional signals with, (2) communicative intent, and possibly (3) reference to some external object or event other than the childs own ability to “show off.” In general, gestural development seems to involve expansion of the repertoire from 9 to 13 months. However, there is some evidence that more ritualized requests and refusals are replacing unritualized versions of those two functions. Within language development, there is also a language complex emerging from 9 to 13 months, indicating some sort of interdependence between comprehension and both referential and nonreferential production. Furthermore, language development in this age range consists primarily of expanding the repertoire.

Brief report: a longitudinal examination of the communicative gestures deficit in young children with autism.

There is agreement in the recent literature on the finding that children with autism show a rather severe deficit in the development of gestural communication along with impaired joint-attention skills (cf. Abrahamsen & Mitchell, 1990; BaronCohen, 1989; Curcio, 1978; Mundy, Sigman, & Kasari, 1994; Mundy, Sigman, Ungerer, & Sherman, 1986; Sigman, Mundy, Ungerer, & Sherman, 1986; Wetherby & Prutting, 1984). Several investigators have observed that autistic children seem quite able to formulate requests for objects, actions, and social routines and to persist until their goal is satisfied. To make these nonverbal requests they use mainly contact gestures, for example, leading a person by the hand toward a desired object/place or putting the adults hand on a toy they want to activate. Less frequently they make requests for objects or actions via distal gestures, such as pointing, showing, offering/giving, and ritualized requests.3 In one of the first

Chapter 4 – FIRST WORDS IN LANGUAGE AND ACTION: A QUALITATIVE LOOK

Publisher Summary Strong correspondences have been found between symbol development in play and language in three aspects: (1) correlations in frequency and rate, (2) overlap in referential content, and (3) parallels in qualitative levels and sequences of development. Within language, a developmental progression has been found from what is termed “nonreferential” to “referential” uses of words. The nonreferential words are not names for actions or entities; rather, they are procedures that are used in restricted contexts that may include particular actions or entities. At each developmental level, the difference between substantives and function words has to do with the kinds of referents—entities, events, relationships—involved in that language game or procedure. However, both kinds of words are in themselves functions. The field of child language research has been divided regarding: (1) the developmental levels of word use—that is, in terms of contextual freedom, (2) the kinds of features that predominate in the rules for using words, (3) the structure of the categories that underlie word use, and (4) individual differences in the things that children want to accomplish with words.

The Emergence of Intentional Communication in Ontogeny, Phylogeny, and Pathology

The emergence of intentional gestural communication around the end of the first year of life is widely recognized as a basic milestone in the infants communicative development. Two types of comparison are carried out in this paper. The first comparison concerns the gestural communication of human infants and of our nearest primate relatives, the apes, and especially the well-studied chimpanzees. The second comparison considers a special case of gestural communication, namely children with autism, who fail to develop some important forms of communication, language, and social interaction that normal infants develop in the first 2 years of life. In seeking to explain the patterns of similarities and differences derived from these two comparisons, the possible role of several developmental processes will be considered and evaluated: social sensitivity, sensitivity to eye contact and gaze, understanding of agency, and understanding of subjectivity.

Noun versus verb emphasis in Italian mother-to-child speech*

This paper examines naturalistic adult-to-child speech produced by 15 Italian middle-class mothers to determine which specific patterns characterize linguistic input to children at 1;4 and 1;8. Since Italian is a pro-drop language, we expect that adult-to-child speech will show a bias towards a more salient semantic and morphological significance of verbs relative to nouns. We expect that verbs will more likely occupy the sentence-initial position, and have more morphological inflections relative to nouns. Mother-to-child speech was coded for type and token frequency, utterance position, and morphological variation of nouns and verbs. The results confirm our predictions. Namely, Italian-speaking mothers produced verb types and tokens more frequently than noun types and tokens, they placed verbs more frequently than nouns in salient utterance position, and they morphologically marked verb stems more than noun stems.

Maternal speech to 1‐year‐old children in two Italian cultural contexts

The present study examines maternal speech to 1-year-old children in two cultural contexts in the same nation: an urban industrial town (Padua) and a small rural village (Ruoti). The aim was to evaluate if and how intranational cultural variation influences the ways in which Italian-speaking mothers use language when addressing their children. We hypothesized that mothers in the rural context would adopt speech acts with a control function (‘directive’ speech style) more than mothers in the urban context, whereas urban mothers would use speech acts with a didactic and a tutorial function more than rural mothers (‘child-centred’ speech style). Forty primiparous mothers and their 13-month-old children were videotaped at home in a play session. Maternal speech from transcripts was examined in terms of five different communicative functions (Tutorial, Didactic, Conversational, Control, and Asynchronous) using a 21-category coding scheme validated in previous studies. Parents also completed a demographic and living standards questionnaire. The results showed systematic cultural differences in a variety of maternal communicative functions, presumably related to different life environments and childrearing practices in the two sites.