Multi Modal Observation

At this point we can begin to understand the limitations of body language, facial expression and gesture when language is not available. Although they allow for instant communication they cannot help a child to understand what is being seen or provide a way in which afterwards the child can communicate what she has seen. This means that children who only have the basic communication skills of body language, gesture and facial

What is the role of eye contact and shared reference in establishing communication loops when interacting with an infant?

The first two years of a child’s life is filled with adventure and learning. Throughout this time period they will learn to sit up, crawl, walk, talk, amongst many more things. Their psychological development and interactions with their social environment change along with their forms of communication as they mature and learn; all of which can be seen and explained in Erikson’s stages of development and child-directed speech.

I have discovered that language is expressed in a wide variety of ways; orally, written words, pictures, through facial expressions or a person’s posture. A perfect example of this is a video depicting two toddler’s talking with one another even at this young age the two toddles are communicating without any real speech patterns and as the observer I could not help but notice that they were effectively expressing their thought with facial expressions

Infants learn to communicate with adults by gestures, crying, pointing and with baby talk. During my observation on how an infant communicates with adults around him, I could observe that during playing time the infant wanted to get the attention of the adult by going to the adult and tapping the adult with his hand on the arm and doing “baby talk” and the infant showed the toy to the adult when the adult smile and told the infant “wow” in surprise and asked him “what was the toy?” the infant smile and did “baby talk” again and turn around and went back to the toys he was playing with. Then after a few minutes the infant came back and brought a picture book and sat next to the adult and the infant open the book and point one of the pictures

The long-standing question in joint attention research, as described by Tomasello, Carpenter, and Liszkowski (2007) are “the current theoretical debates about infant pointing and prelinguistic communication center [around] whether the most accurate interpretation is a cognitively rich or cognitively lean one” (p.705). The arguably dominant rich interpretations of the debate suggest that infant pointing is intended to influence the mental and intentional states of others. Conversely, the lean interpretations of infant pointing suggest that infants are merely trying to bring about a behavioural response in others, without necessarily understanding them as

Masapollo, M., Polka, L., & Ménard, L. (2015). When infants talk, infants listen: Pre-babbling infants prefer listening to speech with infant vocal properties. Developmental Science, 19(2), 318-328.

The mode that stood out to me the most was observational mode. The example they gave was about a fly on a wall. The camera men did not disturb this fly they just carefully watched it from a distance. The documenters picked up on the the sounds with microphones and images, using cameras and recordings that go unnoticed by the fly in its natural surroundings. If the fly was put in a room it was unfamiliar with they would be messing up the the documenting. Basically what observational mode is stepping back from a far and watching what is going on in a situation of life over a course of time without the person being watch, feel like they are being watched. Some of the types of people that have been documented in a documentary could be a painter,

Though the human body and brain combination, does posses an innate learning and instinctual understanding, there is also a predominate component of almost undetectable, innate teaching (Sorensen, 2016) and learning necessary from the very beginning of life. A toddler, who has been read to, is in actuality, being introduced to communication semantics, and building a vocabulary (Abbott, 2013, p. 156) filled with nuanced inflection and drama. The baby experiences a multimodal (Department of Education WA et al., 2013, p. 64) phonemic (Light, McNaughton, & Penn State, 2012) learning with phonological or oral language (Lewis, 2016) appreciation and awareness in this way. The translation of this academic terminology is that the child learns to

Gestures are an essential aspect in order to fully develop and understand language. They aid a child in communicating his or her wants and needs many months before they are capable of doing so verbally. According to the text, at the end of the perlocutionary stage, children begin to use gestures in order to display goal-directed behaviors (Hulit, Fahey, Howard, 2014). Since it is a gradual process for infants to develop knowledge and produce words, gestures perform as the ways in which babies are able to respond that is used by parents as well as begin interaction with them. Various types of gestures that will be explored are deictic gestures, beat gestures, representational gestures, and emblem gestures. The first type of gesture to be discussed is deictic

However, the underlying structure of these two studies are similar. In the first study, after the familiarization phase between the infants and the experimenters, the infant is instructed to play two different activities sequentially and the particular experiences they have with each activity is shared with one of the experimenters. Then, based on these shared experiences between the infant and the experimenters, the researcher examines the infant’s response to the experimenters’ produced pointing gesture in the same manner. However, while pointing at the target object, the experimenter gave the infant a response period by using verbal phase with alternating gaze between the infant and the object to draw the infant’s attention and this process will be repeated if they failed to do so. Similarly, the second study demonstrates a simpler version of the first study by only creating one shared experience between the infant and one of the experimenters and use the presence of the second experimenter as an unshared condition. As results, although 14-month olds infant failed to respond differently to the pointing gesture of the experimenters based on their

They discovered an early social behavior to connect a baby’s ability to learn new language sound is called gaze shifting. Gaze shifting is when a baby makes eye contact at the same object as the other person such as a tutor. They did studies on infants with a tutor, and toys to measure how fast their brain can response and capable of doing. According to Brooks, infant gaze shifting serves as a building block for more complicated language and social skills. Researchers

Furthermore, the trajectory of babbling to the production of first words, are necessary components to the structure of language, and deaf infants have been observed to follow similar patterns of babbling at similar ages as hearing infants. It is also important that infants are exposed to language from birth, in that the critical period of language acquisition is a factor in language mastery. Therefore, it can be asserted that sign language is a definite language as opposed to a form of

Over the years, there has been a growing trend to teach infants sign language. There are DVDs, books, classes, etc. that show you how to teach signs to your baby. The programs and materials claim that teaching an infant sign language can help the baby better communicate his or her needs/wants, develop a closer bond with his or her caregiver, and also positively impact the development of the child’s language. Following the claims of these programs, Elizabeth Kirk and Neil Howlett (from the University of Hertfordshire) and Karen J. Pine and Ben (C) Fletcher (from the University of Hertfordshire and Istanbul Bilgi University) conducted two studies to see how gesturing (using sign language) to infants impacts language development and the relationship

Mother-infant interaction provides the starting point for intersubjectivity (Trevarthen, 1979). Research has shown that infants as young as 3 months can shift focus and visual