Early semantic development: Linking language development to emerging participation in social events
General, Cognitive and Mathematical Psychology
Developmental and Educational Psychology
Final Report Abstract
The Early Semantic Development (EASE) project, realized collaboratively by the University of Warsaw, the Paderborn University and the University of Portsmouth, was geared towards understanding the semantic, sense-making skills that develop within active interaction participants, and towards identifying the structures of the natural, socially enacted niche that prompt and sustain this development. The main purpose was to understand the rich, interactive and meaningful ground that is available for linguistic development. The findings are manifold. With respect to our objective, to provide a framework for understanding early interactions educating perception and attention of infants toward social interaction, we analyzed children’s gaze behavior and how it is coupled with their caregiver. We found that the engagement in mutual gaze decreases with age, but the behavior becomes more tightly coupled as a more regular temporal structure emerges. In support of previous results, we can thus confirm that a conventionalization/routinization process is observable in which children become more efficient in using some means for interaction. Following the objective to investigate the controlling power our language, we found evidence that from early on, mothers seem to answer to any speech related vocalization within the first two seconds, but this pattern fades away at six and eight months. What remains stable across age is a structure in which overlapping vocalizations are rare and give way to a sequential pattern of vocal reciprocity. This reciprocity was further investigated using new methods to extend current approaches on turn-taking. We found that early in the development, reciprocity is multimodal—a fact that needs to be taken into consideration when further investigating the controlling power of language. Having utilized novel approaches to turn-taking led us to novel questions with respect to how to evaluate multimodal interaction patterns and how to calculate their significance. We regret that these questions could not be pursued further within this project, especially, because they are in line with ongoing discussions. Another objective of the project was to extend theoretical models of early word learning. In addressing it, we conducted eye-tracking studies to reveal that young infants at the age of 10 months are sensitive to social cues. Our findings contrast thus the results reported in Pruden et al. (2006). In our review, as an alternative to “saliency”, we propose the concept of relevance, which is derived from the history of social interaction and thus the experience with a referent that a child might have. Finally, our aim was to explain the process of decontextualization, i.e., the way of how language that is tightly coupled with actions early in the development, become “ungrounded”. We found evidence suggesting that decontextualized speech is present from in early input to children. The function of it needs to be further investigated. Our results revealed that, together with verbs that are presented in temporal synchrony with bodily actions, the amount of decontextualized verbs early in the input to infants also contributed to their later reported verb understanding. Furthermore, in a conceptual work an approach to how to “unground” language in the acquisition process was proposed. We argue that “ungrounding” of symbolic forms takes place in a multithread complex process that, at the same time, maintains grounding of the system in which they are embedded and in which iconic and indexical grounding is progressively augmented or replaced by symbol-symbol relations. This involves aspects of conventionalization, abstraction, generalization, and systematicity.
Publications
- (2016). Constructing interaction: The development of gaze dynamics. Infant and Child Development, 25, 277–295
Nomikou, I., Leonardi, G., Rohlfing, K. J., and Rączaszek-Leonardi, J.
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1002/icd.1975) - (2016). Vocal interactions at the dawn of communication: the emergence of mutuality and complementarity in mother-infant interaction. In Proceedings of the Joint IEEE International Conference on Development and Learning and Epigenetic Robotics (ICDL-EpiRob) (pp. 288–293)
Leonardi, G., Nomikou, I., Rohlfing, K. J., & Rączaszek-Leonardi, J.
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1109/DEVLRN.2016.7846835) - (2017). Taking up an active role: Emerging participation in early mother–infant interaction during peekaboo routines. Frontiers in Psychology, 8, 1656
Nomikou, I., Leonardi, G., Radkowska, A., Rączaszek-Leonardi, J., & Rohlfing, K. J.
(See online at https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.01656) - (2017). Time Scales for Understanding the Agency of Infants and Caregivers: In: N. J. Enfield and Paul Kockelman (eds.). Distributed Agency: The Sharing of Intention, Cause, and Accountability. Oxford University Press: N.Y.
Rączaszek-Leonardi, J.
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780190457204.003.0017) - (2017). Verbs in mothers’ input to 6-month-olds: synchrony between presentation, meaning, and actions is related to later verb acquisition. Brain Sciences, 7(5), 52
Nomikou, I., Koke, M. & Rohlfing, K. J.
(See online at https://doi.org/10.3390/brainsci7050052) - (2018). A method for the computation of entropy in the Recurrence Quantification Analysis of categorical time series. Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, 512, 824–836
Leonardi, G.
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1016/j.physa.2018.08.058) - (2018): Language development from an ecological perspective: Ecologically valid ways to abstract symbols. Ecological Psychology, 30, 39–73
Rączaszek-Leonardi, J., Nomikou, I., Rohlfing, K. J. & Deacon, T. W.
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1080/10407413.2017.1410387) - (2019). Frühe Sprachentwicklung. Tübingen: UTB
Rohlfing, K. J.
- (2019). Multimodal turn-taking: motivations, methodological challenges, and novel approaches. IEEE Transactions on Cognitive and Developmental Systems
Rohlfing, K. J., Leonardi, G., Nomikou, I., Raczaszek-Leonardi, J., & Hüllermeier, E.
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1109/TCDS.2019.2892991) - (2019). The role of saliency in learning first words. Frontiers in Psychology, 10, 1150
Wildt, E., Rohlfing, K. J. & Scharlau, I.
(See online at https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.01150) - (2019): Levels of coordination in early semantic development. Psychology of Language and Communication, 23, 39–73
Rączaszek-Leonardi, J., Rossmanith, N., Nomikou, I., Rohlfing, K. J.
(See online at https://doi.org/10.2478/plc-2019-0010)
