Cross-sectional and longitudinal observations of pointing gestures by infants and their caregivers in Japan

A new online paradigm to measure spontaneous pointing in infants and caregivers

Index-finger pointing is a milestone in the development of referential communication. Previous research has investigated infants' pointing with a variety of paradigms ranging from parent reports to field observations to experimental settings, suggesting that lab-based semi-natural interactional settings seem especially suited to elicit and measure infant pointing. With the Covid-pandemic the need for a comparable online tool became evident enabling also efficient, low-cost, large-scale, diverse data collection. The current study introduces a remote online paradigm, based on the established live 'decorated-room' paradigm. In Experiment 1, 12-months old infants and their caregivers (N = 24) looked at digitally presented stimuli together while being recorded with their webcam. We coded pointing gestures of infants and caregivers as well as caregivers' responses to infants' pointing. In Experiment 2 (N = 47), we optimized stimuli and investigated influences of stimulus characteristics. We systematically varied the style of depiction, stimulus complexity, motion, and facial stimuli. Main findings were that infants and caregivers pointed spontaneously, with mean behaviors ranging within the benchmarks of previously reported findings of the live decorated-room paradigm. Further, the social setting was preserved as revealed by significant relations between parents' responsive points and infants' pointing frequency. Analyses of stimuli characteristics revealed that infants pointed more to stimuli depicting faces than to other stimuli. The new remote online paradigm proves a useful addition to established paradigms. It offers novel opportunities for simplified assessments, large-scale sampling, and worldwide, diversified data collection.

Early communicative gestures in human and chimpanzee 1-year-olds observed across diverse socioecological settings

We investigated the communicative gestures used by chimpanzee and human infants. In contrast to previous studies, we compared the species at the same age (12-14 months) and used multiple groups living in diverse socioecological settings for both species. We recorded gestures produced by infants and those produce by others and directed toward infants. We classified the gestures into the following types: human-usual, chimpanzee-usual, and species-common; and searched for within species and between species differences. We found no significant differences between groups or species in overall rates of infant-produced or infant-received gestures, suggesting that all of these infants produced and received gestures at similar levels. We did find significant differences, however, when we considered the three types of gesture. Chimpanzee infants produced significantly higher rates of chimpanzee-usual gestures, and human infants produced significantly higher rates of human-usual gestures, but there was no significant species difference in the species-common gestures. Reports of species differences in gesturing in young infants, therefore, could be influenced by investigators' choice of gesture type. Interestingly, we found that 1-year-old infants produced the gesture of "hold mutual gaze" and that the chimpanzee infants had a significantly higher rate than the human infants. We did not find strong evidence that the specific types of gestural environment experienced by young infants influenced the types of gestures that infants produce. We suggest that at this point in development (before human infants use lots of speech), nonverbal communicative gestures may be equally important for human and chimpanzee infants.

Ontogeny of index-finger pointing

Index-finger pointing is foundational to language acquisition. Less is known about its emergence. In lab-based monthly longitudinal assessments from 8-13 months (N = 31) the study measured longitudinal predictors of index-finger pointing: parent pointing and infants' earlier emerging showing, hand-pointing, and point-following. All behaviors increased significantly with age and showed inter-individual stability. At 11 months all behaviors except hand pointing were synchronously interrelated, with no evidence for an earlier synchronous interrelation between behaviors. Caregiver pointing and infants' earlier behaviors longitudinally predicted the age of emergence of index-finger pointing. An additional cross-sectional comparison of parent pointing at 5 and 7 months (N = 44) showed that significantly fewer caregivers of 5- compared to 7-month-olds pointed for their infants. Findings suggest that pointing emerges as an outcome of social co-construction across the first year of life.

Coaching Childcare Providers to Support Toddlers' Gesture Use With Children Experiencing Early Childhood Poverty

Purpose The purpose of this study is to examine the impact of an intervention in which childcare providers (CCPs) are coached to support toddlers' gesture use during every day classroom routines. Method This study uses a multiple-baseline across strategies single-case experimental design to examine the impact of a coaching intervention on three CCPs' use of communication strategies with toddlers experiencing early childhood poverty. The CCPs were coached with a systematic framework called Setting the Stage, Observation and Opportunities to Embed, Problem-solving and Planning, Reflection and Review as they learned to implement three strategies to support toddlers' gesture use-modeling gestures with a short phrase, opportunities to gesture, and responding/expanding child gestures. CCPs were coached during book sharing and another classroom routine of their choice. Social validity data on the coaching approach and on the intervention strategies were gathered from postintervention interviews. Results The visual analysis and nonoverlap of all pairs' effect size indicates that the coaching intervention had a functional relation with CCPs' use of modeling gestures and responding/expanding gestures during book sharing, play, and circle time. Social validity data indicate that CCPs found the coaching framework supportive of their learning and feelings of self-efficacy, and that the intervention strategies supported their toddlers' communication. Conclusions The coaching framework was used to increase CCP strategy use during everyday classroom routines with toddlers. CCPs endorsed the coaching approach and the intervention strategies. This study adds to the literature supporting efforts to enhance children's earliest language learning environments. Supplemental Material https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.14044055.

Solving visual object ambiguities when pointing: an unsupervised learning approach

Whenever we are addressing a specific object or refer to a certain spatial location, we are using referential or deictic gestures usually accompanied by some verbal description. Particularly, pointing gestures are necessary to dissolve ambiguities in a scene and they are of crucial importance when verbal communication may fail due to environmental conditions or when two persons simply do not speak the same language. With the currently increasing advances of humanoid robots and their future integration in domestic domains, the development of gesture interfaces complementing human–robot interaction scenarios is of substantial interest. The implementation of an intuitive gesture scenario is still challenging because both the pointing intention and the corresponding object have to be correctly recognized in real time. The demand increases when considering pointing gestures in a cluttered environment, as is the case in households. Also, humans perform pointing in many different ways and those variations have to be captured. Research in this field often proposes a set of geometrical computations which do not scale well with the number of gestures and objects and use specific markers or a predefined set of pointing directions. In this paper, we propose an unsupervised learning approach to model the distribution of pointing gestures using a growing-when-required (GWR) network. We introduce an interaction scenario with a humanoid robot and define the so-called ambiguity classes. Our implementation for the hand and object detection is independent of any markers or skeleton models; thus, it can be easily reproduced. Our evaluation comparing a baseline computer vision approach with our GWR model shows that the pointing-object association is well learned even in cases of ambiguities resulting from close object proximity.

Different Ways of Making a Point: A Study of Gestural Communication in Typical and Atypical Early Development

Deictic pointing is among the most impaired gestures in children with autism. Research on typical development demonstrates that contact with the referent and handshape when pointing, are associated with different communicative intentions and developmental stages. Despite their importance, the morphological features of pointing remain largely unexplored in autism. The aim of the present study was to map out pointing production in autism with a focus on handshape and contact with the referent. Participants (age range = 1–6 years old) with ASD (n = 16), at high risk for autism (n = 13) and typically developing children (n = 18) interacted with their caregivers in a gesture elicitation task. Results showed that children with ASD produced fewer pointing gestures overall and fewer index finger pointing without contact with the referent compared to the typically developing children.

Lay Summary

Children with autism produce less gestures than typical children, and pointing gestures appear to be more affected than other gesture types. Whether children point using their index finger or the palm, and whether they touch or not the referent is crucial for understanding communicative intentions. This is the first study to document experimentally exactly how pointing gestures differ in autism in comparison to typical development. We found important qualitative differences in the communicative patterns of children with autism and at risk for autism, that may serve to identify potential new markers for early diagnosis. Autism Res 2021, 14: 984–996. © 2020 The Authors. Autism Research published by International Society for Autism Research and Wiley Periodicals LLC.

Using Vector Autoregression Modeling to Reveal Bidirectional Relationships in Gender/Sex-Related Interactions in Mother-Infant Dyads

Vector autoregression (VAR) modeling allows probing bidirectional relationships in gender/sex development and may support hypothesis testing following multi-modal data collection. We show VAR in three lights: supporting a hypothesis, rejecting a hypothesis, and opening up new questions. To illustrate these capacities of VAR, we reanalyzed longitudinal data that recorded dyadic mother-infant interactions for 15 boys and 15 girls aged 3 to 11 months of age. We examined monthly counts of 15 infant behaviors and 13 maternal behaviors (Seifer et al., 1994). VAR models demonstrated that infant crawling predicted a subsequently close feedback loop from mothers of boys but a subsequently open-ended, branched response from mothers of girls. A different finding showed that boys' standing independently predicted significant later increases of four maternal behaviors: rocking/jiggling, lifting, affectionate touching, and stimulation of infant gross-motor activity. In contrast, crawling by girls led mothers to later decrease the same maternal behaviors. Thus, VAR might allow us to identify how mothers respond differently during daily interactions depending on infant gender/sex. The present work intends to mainly showcase the VAR method in the specific context of the empirical study of gender/sex development.