Publications
Publication details [#55924]
Fais, Laurel, Julia Leibowich, Ladan Hamadani and Lana Ohira. 2012. Infant movement as a window into language processing. In Guidetti, Michèle and Jean-Marc Colletta, eds. Gesture and Multimodal Development. (Benjamins Current Topics 39). John Benjamins. pp. 99–127. xii,+223 pp
Publication type
Article in book
Publication language
English
Keywords
Place, Publisher
John Benjamins
Annotation
This paper demonstrates differential, systematic, cross-modal responses to language by contrasting the regularities of infant movement behavior in contexts in which infants are presented with language stimuli, with those exhibited in the context of music. Using a detailed coding system, the paper shows that infants recognize the social underpinnings of language and respond to language stimuli with vocal, gaze, head, and torso, (but not arm or manual) movements that differ from those exhibited to music stimuli. The paper proposes that measures of these sorts of bodily gestures can not only provide a reliable supplement to looking time measures for gauging infant language abilities, but also uncover novel, richly textured nuances to our understanding of infant language acquisition.