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Social cognition, joint attention, and communicative competence from 9 to 15 months of age
M Carpenter1, K Nagell, M Tomasello
1School of Biological Sciences, University of Liverpool, United Kingdom. mcarpent@liverpool.ac.uk
Insights
Around 1 year old, infants develop social-cognitive skills like joint attention and imitation. These skills emerge in a predictable sequence and are interconnected, laying the foundation for early communication.
Area of Science:
- Developmental Psychology
- Cognitive Science
- Linguistics
Background:
- Infants around one year old exhibit emerging social-cognitive skills, indicating an understanding of others as intentional beings.
- These crucial skills, including joint attention, gaze following, imitation, and gesture production, have often been studied in isolation.
- Understanding the interconnected development of these social-cognitive abilities is vital for explaining early human development.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate the co-emergence and interrelations of key social-cognitive behaviors in infants aged 9-15 months.
- To examine the developmental sequence of social-cognitive skills, from sharing to following to directing attention.
- To explore the relationship between infant-mother joint engagement and the development of infants' communicative competence.
Main Methods:
- Longitudinal study tracking 24 infants from 9 to 15 months with monthly assessments.
- Measured joint attentional engagement, gaze and point following, imitation, gesture production (imperative and declarative), and language comprehension/production.
- Assessed nonsocial-cognitive skills for comparison and analyzed mother-infant interaction, focusing on joint engagement and maternal language use.
Main Results:
- A reliable developmental pattern emerged: infants progressed from sharing to following to directing attention and behavior.
- Nonsocial skills did not follow a predictable developmental sequence, unlike social-cognitive skills.
- Maternal use of language to follow infant attention and the duration of joint engagement significantly predicted infants' early gestural and linguistic communication skills.
Conclusions:
- Social-cognitive skills emerge in an interconnected and predictable sequence, distinct from nonsocial cognitive development.
- Maternal interaction, particularly joint attention and responsive language, plays a crucial role in fostering infants' early communication abilities.
- Findings offer insights into theories of social-cognitive and language development, highlighting the process of cultural participation.
Abstract:
At around 1 year of age, human infants display a number of new behaviors that seem to indicate a newly emerging understanding of other persons as intentional beings whose attention to outside objects may be shared, followed into, and directed in various ways. These behaviors have mostly been studied separately. In the current study, we investigated the most important of these behaviors together as they emerged in a single group of 24 infants between 9 and 15 months of age. At each of seven monthly visits, we measured joint attentional engagement, gaze and point following, imitation of two different kinds of actions on objects, imperative and declarative gestures, and comprehension and production of language. We also measured several nonsocial-cognitive skills as a point of comparison. We report two studies. The focus of the first study was the initial emergence of infants' social-cognitive skills and how these skills are related to one another developmentally. We found a reliable pattern of emergence: Infants progressed from sharing to following to directing others' attention and behavior. The nonsocial skills did not emerge predictably in this developmental sequence. Furthermore, correlational analyses showed that the ages of emergence of all pairs of the social-cognitive skills or their components were inter-related. The focus of the second study was the social interaction of infants and their mothers, especially with regard to their skills of joint attentional engagement (including mothers' use of language to follow into or direct infants' attention) and how these skills related to infants' early communicative competence. Our measures of communicative competence included not only language production, as in previous studies, but also language comprehension and gesture production. It was found that two measures--the amount of time infants spent in joint engagement with their mothers and the degree to which mothers used language that followed into their infant's focus of attention--predicted infants' earliest skills of gestural and linguistic communication. Results of the two studies are discussed in terms of their implications for theories of social-cognitive development, for theories of language development, and for theories of the process by means of which human children become fully participating members of the cultural activities and processes into which they are born.