Symposium
Chairs: Margaret Harris and Luigia Camaioni
Discussant: Patricia Zukow-Goldring
This symposium focuses on the emergence of symbolic communication in the second year of life. Each of the four papers considers this process in a different group of children but each asks common questions about the way that a joint communicative focus is established and what role this play in the emergence of language. The four papers also share a similar methodology in using intensive, longitudinal observation of interaction in parent-child dyads and they highlight individual differences as well as common patterns. The first paper sets the scene by reporting a study of typical development between 10 and 24 months and it considers how children move from sharing action to sharing symbols via conventional frames. The paper considers the extent to which children differ in their rate and course of their development over this period. The second paper discusses the establishment of joint attention in children who have been diagnosed as autistic. These children typically show a lack of joint attention and a failure to use referential pointing. Through an intensive study of three children, the authors provide a detailed account of the difficulties that autistic children experience in structuring and maintaining joint attention with their mothers. The third paper focuses on the extent to which blind infants and their parents are able to establish and maintain joint attention. Seven infants were studied and, of these, two showed age-appropriate joint attention but the other five did not. Four of these five also showed autistic-like symptoms. The paper considers how and why blind children differ in their ability to develop normal patterns of joint attention. The final paper is concerned with early language development in children born with a profound hearing loss. It considers how deaf children's visual attention to their mothers is affected by their inability to use sound as a cue; and the extent to which deaf children are able to observe both language and its referents through the visual channel. These issue are discussed in relation to individual differences in vocabulary size at 2 years.
Details of individual items:
paper
Between 10 and 24 months of age children progress from communicating through conventional signals to communicating through symbols in a variety of situations. In a previous study we investigated this transition analysing both mother-child shared focus frames and child's communicative acts, and we tried to establish the relationship between communicative frames and acts across time. Clear developmental trajectories were found showing that conventional frames and acts 'bridge' the transition from attentional to symbolic communication. Since conventions are mid-way between actions and symbols, this explains why sharing a communication focus through conventional means may serve as a bridge between sharing an attentional focus and sharing symbols. In the present study eight mother-child dyads (4 girls, 4 boys) were observed every two weeks, from 10 to 24 months of age, using a multiple case-study method. Through the detailed investigation of these single cases, intensively observed over the second year, our aim is twofold: (a) to confirm the developmental trends already found in the previous study and (b) to carefully analyze whether and how children and dyads differ in their developmental rhythms and trajectories, as well as in the relationship between specific frames and specific communicative acts.
paper
Joint attention entails the integration of object interest and interpersonal engagement. This integration is a sine qua non for referential communication; without it, social partners cannot converse about a shared topic. There is considerable research that documents the emergence of joint attention during the first year of life in typically-developing infants and that indicates that individuals with autism experience extraordinary difficulties mastering even its rudiments. In this presentation, we argue that viewing the joint attention deficit in autism from a developmental perspective may provide insight into the communication development of both typical toddlers and very young children with autism. From a developmental perspective, joint attention appears not as a single skill but as a series of accomplishments. The typical progression begins with the year-old infant's coordination of attention to a caregiver and an object close at hand and proceeds with the expansion of the scope of shared topics as language gradually allows the distant and the imaginary to be drawn into conversations. One of the first manifestations of autism is often a lack of joint attention in general and the lack of referential pointing in specific. Although this deficit has been well documented, there are as yet few detailed descriptions of how very young children with autism communicate at this critical point in development. Such descriptions may help answer several pressing questions including whether the joint attention deficit is due to missing precursors or to problems with their integration, why joint attention problems appear particularly pronounced in communicative contexts such as commenting as compared to requesting, and how a child with autism who does acquire language might use symbols to share attention. The heuristic value of taking a developmental perspective on joint attention is illustrated using three case studies of young children with autism. All three children participated in a larger longitudinal study of the development of joint attention of typical toddlers and of very young children who meet the DSM-IV criteria for autism according a clinician and to the Autism Diagnostic Interview. Each child was observed five times at three month intervals for one year beginning before the child's third birthday using a Communication Play Protocol that generated several hours of videotapes of mother-child interaction in a range of communicative contexts. These videotapes and the transcripts derived from them were analyzed to sketch growth curves of how each child shared attention with his mother over the year-long period. A case by case analysis provides a compelling picture not only of how all three children experienced difficulties structuring and sustaining joint attention throughout the study but also of how varied the manifestation of these difficulties may be between children and for the same child over time. Particularly intriguing is the finding that each child followed a different developmental trajectory that seemed, in part, to reflect his differential mastery of language as a representational system.
paper
Many disciplines, including philosophy, cognitive neuroscience,developmental psychopathology and comparative behavioural biology havecontributed to our knowledge about the extent to which humans, primates andother species handle the intentional relations of themselves and theirconspecifics. Given the diversity of disciplines involved, it is remarkablethat the core of the available explanatory architecture, whether it beempirically, theoretically or speculatively determined, has remainedundeniably loyal to the authority of vision in regulating aspects of socialfunctioningThe study of blind infant's understanding of intentional relations shouldprovide us with fresh insight into the way non-visual senses influence thedevelopmental trajectory of social understanding in humans - both innon-clinical and clinical populations. The present study examined the extentto which social knowledge derived from a combination of haptic, auditory andlinguistic information alone is sufficient for achieving age appropriateunderstanding of intentional relations. Our aim was to collect descriptivedata on the extent to which blind infants and their parents are able toestablish and maintain joint attention together.Previous research suggests significant variability in the extent to whichblind children manifest autistic-like tendencies (Brown et al.1997). Inlight of this, we used a longitudinal prospective design to compare thenature of parent-infant interactions with the emergence of autistic-likebehaviour after infancy. We videotaped seven blind infants (mean age 21months) at home on two occasions for 20 minutes while they played togetherwith their parents. We administered the Childhood Autistic Rating Scale(Schopler et al., 1988) after infancy (mean age 4.4 years) and classifiedfour children as autistic-like (AL) and three as non-autistic-like (NAL).Our findings indicated that all infants were able to accept parental bids,indicating that, regardless of group, attempts to triangulate theinteraction onto an external referent were successful, at least when createdby the parent. However, when we looked at infant bids, we found that onlyone infant in the NAL group showed an object to their parent and none of theinfants attempted to take their mother's hand to an object. We coded forequivalents of 'look at that', 'look at me' comments and found one infant inthe NAL group who used such strategies. Overall, we found AL dyads spentsubstantially less time than NAL dyads touching the same object at the sametime.Our study demonstrated that two of these blind infants manifested ageappropriate understanding of intentional relations, though they relied on arestricted range of strategies. However, we also identified infants whoseemed to manifest a delay in social deficits, as seems likely in the ALgroup. These findings are discussed in terms of the relationship betweeninfant blindness and developmental risk and the kinds of protectiveprocesses potentially associated with different kinds of developmentaloutcome in this population.
paper
This paper considers how infants with congenital or early-acquired deafness learn to communicate with their mothers in the second year of life. Although there remains some debate about whether deaf children acquire sign language at the same rate as hearing children acquire spoken language, there is general agreement that, potentially, deaf children are be confronted by difficulties that do not confront hearing children. Linguistic communication for deaf children - be it signed or spoken - takes place primarily through the visual modality. In the case of sign language, a deaf child must learn to look at hand shape, position and movement as well as the signer's face. In the case of spoken language, a deaf child must look at the speaker's face - especially the lips and tongue - in order to be able to lip read what is being said. Visual attention is thus crucial for the successful use of language and communication by deaf children and their communicative partners.Attention to the message is not, however, the only requirement for successful language development. For young children to acquire new vocabulary they also have to attend to objects and events to which the message refers. Hearing children can make use of both hearing and vision to do this but, for deaf children, verbal labels (whether presented through sign or spoken language) have to be presented visually and so there is a potential conflict between observing the signed or spoken label and the object (or event) to which it refers. This paper considers how this conflict is resolved. It examines the amount and quality of visual attention to their mother shown by deaf 18-month-old children and the amount of maternal language that refers to objects and events that are at the child's focus attention. These measures will be compared with the patterns evident in typically developing children and also related to the deaf children's own language competence at the age of two years. The pathways to early language for the deaf and hearing child will be compared.