"My baby is ready to learn"-The role of infant pointing in redirecting maternal responses to be more informative.

Caregivers may perceive pointing as an indication of infants' readiness to learn, thereby increasing their tendency to label objects regardless of the infant's gesture type and context. This was investigated in this study by tracking 35 infants at home at the ages of 11 and 13 months and observing their interactions with their mothers during object manipulation. We focused on four types of communicative gestures: typical giving gestures, gestures contingent on exploration, gestures contingent on play, and pointing. We analyzed maternal response tendencies, including affirmation, naming, discourse, and pretense. The results revealed that when infants reached the age of 13 months, they tripled their pointing production; in turn, the maternal response changed entirely, with naming becoming the preferred response to all types of gestures. Furthermore, when infants were 13 months old and offered an object contingent on play acts, mothers increased their pretense acts sevenfold. Based on the most informative responses to infants among those examined, we argue that an increase in the number of pointing gestures may gradually be associated with the establishment of the maternal perception that an infant is ready to learn and a subsequent increase in naming and pretense production by the mother.

The context of infants' giving gestures in mother-infant dyads: Typical giving gestures and those contingent on exploration and play.

This study aimed to focus on a niche that has not yet been investigated in infants' gesture studies that is the effect of the prior context of one specific gestural behavior (gives) on maternal behavior. For this purpose, we recruited 23 infants at 11 and 13 months of age yielded 246 giving gesture bouts that were performed in three contexts: typical when the object was offered immediately, contingent on exploration, and contingent on play. The analysis revealed that maternal responses to infants' giving gestures varied and were affected by their age and gesture context. Hence, mothers amended their responses according to the background that generated each gesture. The number of verbal responses to infants' giving gestures decreased as the infants aged, whereas the number of pretense responses increased. For infants aged 11 months, mothers generally provided motor responses to typical gestures. However, for infants aged 13 months, this trend declined and was replaced by a strong positive correlation between giving gestures contingent on play and verbal responses. We concluded that the type of activity with objects prior to employing giving gestures could enhance infants' symbolic skills because caregivers monitor the contingent act that yields the gesture that shapes their response.

Object play as a mediator of the role of exploration in communication skills development.

In this study, we investigated exploration and language development, particularly whether preliminary object play mediates the role of exploration in gesture and speech production. We followed 27 infants, aged 8-17 months, and gathered data on the frequency of their exploration, preliminary functional acts with single or multiple objects, and communicative behaviors (e.g., gesturing and single-word utterances). The results of our path analysis indicated that exploration had a direct effect on single-object play, which, in turn, affected gesturing and advanced object play. Gesturing as well as single and multi-object play affected speech production. These findings suggest that exploration is associated with language development. This association may be facilitated by object play milestones in which infants recall the object's function, which strengthens their memory and representation skills. Further, recalling the usage of an object by the caregivers may encourage an infant's overall imitation tendency, which is important for learning how to communicate with gestures and words.

Beyond the pre-communicative medium: A cross-behavioral prospective study on the role of gesture in language and play development.

This study prospectively explored the role of declarative and imperative gestures in the development of language and symbolic play milestones using a multi-measure micro-analytic approach. Nine infants were observed in their natural home environments once a month for a one hour session between the ages of 8-16 months by recording their spontaneous pre-lingual and lingual form usages and symbolic play acts. This framework enabled the coding of object- and human-directed vocalization, babbling, speech, declarative and imperative gestures, and four types of symbolic play acts: single-object play, single-object sequences, multi-object play, and multi-object sequences. The relative degree of usage of each type of behavior was examined. The results showed that declarative and imperative gestures frequency of usage are related to all language milestones for the short and long term. The infants' gestures were related to symbolic play for the long term; their declarative gestures supported most of the levels of symbolic acts and their imperative gestures supported multi-object sequences. The results are explained in terms of the structural building blocks and contextual framework of gestures, which may scaffold infants' preliminary symbolic behavior.

Talk the Walk: Does Socio-Cognitive Resource Reallocation Facilitate the Development of Walking?

Walking is of interest to psychology, robotics, zoology, neuroscience and medicine. Human's ability to walk on two feet is considered to be one of the defining characteristics of hominoid evolution. Evolutionary science propses that it emerged in response to limited environmental resources; yet the processes supporting its emergence are not fully understood. Developmental psychology research suggests that walking elicits cognitive advancements. We postulate that the relationship between cognitive development and walking is a bi-directional one; and further suggest that the initiation of novel capacities, such as walking, is related to internal socio-cognitive resource reallocation. We shed light on these notions by exploring infants' cognitive and socio-communicative outputs prospectively from 6-18 months of age. Structured bi/tri weekly evaluations of symbolic and verbal development were employed in an urban cohort (N = 9) for 12 months, during the transition from crawling to walking. Results show links between preemptive cognitive changes in socio-communicative output, symbolic-cognitive tool-use processes, and the age of emergence of walking. Plots of use rates of lower symbolic play levels before and after emergence of new skills illustrate reductions in use of previously attained key behaviors prior to emergence of higher symbolic play, language and walking. Further, individual differences in age of walking initiation were strongly related to the degree of reductions in complexity of object-use (r = .832, p < .005), along with increases, counter to the general reduction trend, in skills that serve recruitment of external resources [socio-communication bids before speech (r = -.696, p < .01), and speech bids before walking; r = .729, p < .01)]. Integration of these proactive changes using a computational approach yielded an even stronger link, underscoring internal resource reallocation as a facilitator of walking initiation (r = .901, p<0.001). These preliminary data suggest that representational capacities, symbolic object use, language and social developments, form an integrated adaptable composite, which possibly enables proactive internal resource reallocation, designed to support the emergence of new developmental milestones, such as walking.

Symbolic play and language development.

Symbolic play and language are known to be highly interrelated, but the developmental process involved in this relationship is not clear. Three hypothetical paths were postulated to explore how play and language drive each other: (1) direct paths, whereby initiation of basic forms in symbolic action or babbling, will be directly related to all later emerging language and motor outputs; (2) an indirect interactive path, whereby basic forms in symbolic action will be associated with more complex forms in symbolic play, as well as with babbling, and babbling mediates the relationship between symbolic play and speech; and (3) a dual path, whereby basic forms in symbolic play will be associated with basic forms of language, and complex forms of symbolic play will be associated with complex forms of language. We micro-coded 288 symbolic vignettes gathered during a yearlong prospective bi-weekly examination (N=14; from 6 to 18 months of age). Results showed that the age of initiation of single-object symbolic play correlates strongly with the age of initiation of later-emerging symbolic and vocal outputs; its frequency at initiation is correlated with frequency at initiation of babbling, later-emerging speech, and multi-object play in initiation. Results support the notion that a single-object play relates to the development of other symbolic forms via a direct relationship and an indirect relationship, rather than a dual-path hypothesis.