Let's talk action: Infant-directed speech facilitates infants' action learning

Melanie S Schreiner, Johanna E van Schaik, Jelena Sučević, Sabine Hunnius, Marlene Meyer

Research output: Contribution to JournalArticleAcademicpeer-review

Abstract

Parents modulate their speech and their actions during infant-directed interactions, and these modulations facilitate infants' language and action learning, respectively. But do these behaviors and their benefits cross these modality boundaries? We investigated mothers' infant-directed speech and actions while they demonstrated the action-effects of 4 novel objects to their 14-month-old infants. Mothers (N = 35) spent the majority of the time either speaking or demonstrating the to-be-learned actions to their infant while hardly talking and acting at the same time. Moreover, mothers' infant-directed speech predicted infants' action learning success beyond the effect of infant-directed actions. Thus, mothers' speech modulations during naturalistic interactions do more than support infants' language learning; they also facilitate infants' action learning, presumably by directing and maintaining infants' attention toward the to-be learned actions. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)1623-1631
Number of pages9
JournalDevelopmental Psychology
Volume56
Issue number9
Early online date23 Jul 2020
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - Sept 2020

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