Lewkowicz, & Hansen-Tift, 2012 [L&H-T] investigated the contribution of audio-visual integration to early language development and identified a shift of attention from eyes to mouth. This study aims to assess the relationship between a child's vocal skills and their looking behaviour in a selective audio-visual (preferential looking) task. Twenty-three infants were tested with experimental and observational procedures at 6, 9 and 12 months of age. The eye-tracking experiment, carried out in both the children’s home language, Italian, and an unfamiliar language, English, investigated two areas of attention, the mouth and the eyes. Children were also recorded in their homes in interaction with their mother at all three ages; the number of consonants produced by each infant was extracted from transcriptions of these recordings. The child's vocabulary was assessed at 12 months, using the Italian short version of the McArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventory (MB-CDI; Caselli, et al., 2017). Preliminary results show that at 6 months babies tended to look more at the eyes than at the mouth, in line with L&H-T. However, a repeated-measures ANOVA showed an interaction, at 9 months, between the number of consonants that the infants produced spontaneously and their looking behaviour (F=6.46, p=.015 η2=.755). Specifically, children with higher levels of consonant production showed more attention to the eyes. In contrast, L&H-T report significantly more looking at the mouth at around that age (8 and 10 mos.). At 12 months we found a correlation, for the familiar language only, between comprehension vocabulary on the MB-CDI and the child's looking toward the eyes (r =.889; p =.04); in line with L&H-T, no significant differences emerged between looking toward eyes vs. mouth. These preliminary results suggest a dynamic association between emergent vocal ability, audio-visual integration and language advance in the first year of life.

The association between emergent vocal ability and audio-visual integration in Italian infants

Bastianello T.;Majorano M.
2021-01-01

Abstract

Lewkowicz, & Hansen-Tift, 2012 [L&H-T] investigated the contribution of audio-visual integration to early language development and identified a shift of attention from eyes to mouth. This study aims to assess the relationship between a child's vocal skills and their looking behaviour in a selective audio-visual (preferential looking) task. Twenty-three infants were tested with experimental and observational procedures at 6, 9 and 12 months of age. The eye-tracking experiment, carried out in both the children’s home language, Italian, and an unfamiliar language, English, investigated two areas of attention, the mouth and the eyes. Children were also recorded in their homes in interaction with their mother at all three ages; the number of consonants produced by each infant was extracted from transcriptions of these recordings. The child's vocabulary was assessed at 12 months, using the Italian short version of the McArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventory (MB-CDI; Caselli, et al., 2017). Preliminary results show that at 6 months babies tended to look more at the eyes than at the mouth, in line with L&H-T. However, a repeated-measures ANOVA showed an interaction, at 9 months, between the number of consonants that the infants produced spontaneously and their looking behaviour (F=6.46, p=.015 η2=.755). Specifically, children with higher levels of consonant production showed more attention to the eyes. In contrast, L&H-T report significantly more looking at the mouth at around that age (8 and 10 mos.). At 12 months we found a correlation, for the familiar language only, between comprehension vocabulary on the MB-CDI and the child's looking toward the eyes (r =.889; p =.04); in line with L&H-T, no significant differences emerged between looking toward eyes vs. mouth. These preliminary results suggest a dynamic association between emergent vocal ability, audio-visual integration and language advance in the first year of life.
2021
audio-visual integration
language development
selective visual attention
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Utilizza questo identificativo per citare o creare un link a questo documento: https://hdl.handle.net/11562/1053497
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