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Mothers' use of touch across infants' development and its implications for word learning: Evidence from Korean dyadic interactions |
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| Authors: | Eon-Suk Ko Rana Abu-Zhaya Eun-Sol Kim Taehyeong Kim Kyung-Woon On Hyunji Kim Byoung-Tak Zhang Amanda Seidl |
| Institution: | 1. Department of English Language and Literature, Chosun University, Gwangju, Korea;2. School of Psychology, The University of Plymouth, Plymouth, UK;3. Department of Computer Science, Hanyang University, Seoul, Korea;4. AI Lab, CTO Division, LG Electronics, Seoul, Korea
Department of Biosystems Engineering, Seoul National University, Seoul, Korea;5. Kakao Brain, Seongnam, Korea;6. Department of Computer Science and Engineering & SNU Artificial Intelligence Institute, Seoul National University, Seoul, Korea;7. Department of Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences, Purdue University, Indiana, West Lafayette, USA |
| Abstract: | Caregivers' touches that occur alongside words and utterances could aid in the detection of word/utterance boundaries and the mapping of word forms to word meanings. We examined changes in caregivers' use of touches with their speech directed to infants using a multimodal cross-sectional corpus of 35 Korean mother-child dyads across three age groups of infants (8, 14, and 27 months). We tested the hypothesis that caregivers' frequency and use of touches with speech change with infants' development. Results revealed that the frequency of word/utterance-touch alignment as well as word + touch co-occurrence is highest in speech addressed to the youngest group of infants. Thus, this study provides support for the hypothesis that caregivers' use of touch during dyadic interactions is sensitive to infants' age in a way similar to caregivers' use of speech alone and could provide cues useful to infants' language learning at critical points in early development. |
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