Offre de stage

 Project title: Multimodal communication in Ethiopian and French infants in relation to maternal attention: insights from a cross-cultural comparison
HOST RESEARCH GROUP
Name of the group: Laboratoire CLLE, UMR 5263
Host institution: Université Toulouse Jean Jaurès
Website: https://clle.univ-tlse2.fr/accueil/
SUPERVISORS: Marie Bourjade (CLLE) & Lauren Bader (IAST)
INFORMATION ON THE PROJECT
Short project description:
From the age of approximately 9 to 36 months, human infants develop a series of cognitive and behavioral skills considered as important milestones for adult life (Beuker, Rommelse, Donders, & Buitelaar, 2013; Camaioni, 1997; Carpenter, Nagell, Tomasello, Butterworth, & Moore, 1998). This includes the capability of communicating intentionally through gestures (e.g., pointing), then words, of responding to- and orienting the attention of other persons (i.e., joint attention), of understanding the perceptual range, intents, and then beliefs of others (i.e., Theory of Mind). Importantly, children go through a phase of gestural/visual communication that precedes the emergence of the first spoken words and then show multimodal utterances from the very beginning of their linguistic phase (Esteve-Gibert & Prieto, 2014; Guidetti, Fibigerova, & Colletta, 2014). Yet, it is still unclear whether human infants use auditory communication intentionally outside language. Also, the mechanisms of modal reorganization from intentional gestures to intentional words is still poorly described, while the multimodal expression of joint attention has never been properly quantified. Furthermore, parents’ socialization goals, which vary between cultural contexts, can shape mother-infant communication (Carra, Lavelli, Keller, Kärtner, 2013).The main aim of this research project will be to develop a more empirically informed account of the emergence of multimodal communication and joint attention (JA) in infants interacting with attentive/inattentive mothers across environmental-cultural settings. Human parenting behavior varies across cultural and environmental settings; western mothers engage for example in more object-directed interactions involving visual joint attention than Sub-Saharan African mothers (Bornstein, Putnick, Park, Suwalsky, & Haynes, 2017; Keller, 2008) but the relative proportion of visual and verbal communication in these interactions has not been quantified so far. In the same vein, the initiation of JA is a better predictor of language development than response to JA in westerners (Cochet & Byrne, 2016), but its relationship with language development varies across environmental and cultural settings (Mastin & Vogt, 2016). Furthermore, face-to-face interaction is less common, and body contact more common, among many parents and infants in Sub-Sharan Africa when compared to western parent-infant dyads (Keller, Voelker, & Yovsi, 2005). This suggests a possible unique path between mothers’ parenting styles and communication strategies with infants common among caregivers in many Sub-Saharan contexts (Kärtner et al., 2008), including Southern Ethiopia (Bader & Fouts 2018; Bader, Fouts, & Jaekel, 2019). Thus, cross-cultural comparisons cannot be properly achieved without controlling for environmental and cultural factors.
This project will focus on the comparison between Ethiopian and French infant-mother dyads (infant ages between 7-18 months) to better document the variations and similarities in maternal attention and infant multimodal communication, through the following objectives:
1. Describe and quantify the maternal attention modes as perceptive (i.e., tactile, visual, auditory, and any combination of these, or diverted attention) and active (i.e., infant-directed speech, face-to-face interactions, carrying, embrace)
2. Develop a database of visual, auditory and multimodal signals produced by infants and assigned to the different modes of the mother’s attention.
3. Sample and quantify joint attention events and provide a quantitative description of the sensory modalities used by infants.
4. Provide quantitative description of these behavior in two contrasting environmental & cultural settings, i.e., Ethiopia and France.
This study will ultimately address the role of mothers’ attentional disruption and communicative breakdowns into the development of intentional multimodal communication, providing a basis for between-species comparisons with other primates (Bourjade 2019).
References
Beuker, K. T., Rommelse, N. N., Donders, R., & Buitelaar, J. K. (2013). Development of early communication skills in the
first two years of life. Infant Behavior and Development, 36(1), 71–83.
Bader, L. R., & Fouts, H. N. (2018). Cultural models of infant emotions and needs among the Gamo people of Southern
Ethiopia. Infant Mental Health Journal, 39(5), 497-510.
Bader, L. R., Fouts, H. N., & Jaekel, J. (2019). Mothers’ feelings about infants’ negative emotions and mother-infant
interactions among the Gamo of Southern Ethiopia. Infant Behavior & Development, 54, 22-36.
Carra, C., Lavelli, M., Keller, H., & Kärtner, J. (2013). Parenting Infants: Socialization Goals and Behaviors of Italian
Mothers and Immigrant Mothers from West Africa. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 44(8), 1304-1320.
Bourjade (2019). Disruption of social attention and the tactical use of sensory modalities in primate infant signaling. In: The
forms and functions of primate multimodal communication. Symposium in the 6th Protolang, September 2019,
Lisbon.
Bornstein, M. H., Putnick, D. L., Park, Y., Suwalsky, J. T. D., & Haynes, O. M. (2017). Human infancy and parenting in
global perspective: specificity. Proc. R. Soc. B, 284(1869), 20172168. https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2017.2168
Camaioni, L. (1997). The emergence of intentional communication in ontogeny, phylogeny, and pathology. European
Psychologist, 2(3), 216–225.
Carpenter, M., Nagell, K., Tomasello, M., Butterworth, G., & Moore, C. (1998). Social Cognition, Joint Attention, and
Communicative Competence from 9 to 15 Months of Age. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child
Development, 63(4), 1–174. https://doi.org/10.2307/1166214
Cochet, H., & Byrne, R. W. (2016). Communication in the second and third year of life: Relationships between nonverbal
social skills and language. Infant Behavior and Development, 44, 189–198.
Esteve-Gibert, N., & Prieto, P. (2014). Infants temporally coordinate gesture-speech combinations before they produce their
first words. Speech Communication, 57, 301–316.
Guidetti, M., Fibigerova, K., & Colletta, J.-M. (2014). Gestures and multimodal development. From Gesture in Conversation
to Visible Action as Utterance: Essays in Honor of Adam Kendon, 351.
Kärtner, J., Keller, H., Lamm, B., Abels, M., Yovsi, R. D., Chaudhary, N., & Su, Y. (2008). Similarities and differences in
contingency experiences of 3-month-olds across sociocultural contexts. Infant Behavior & Development, 31(3), 488-
500.
Keller, H. (2008). Culture and biology: The foundation of pathways of development. Social and Personality Psychology
Compass, 2(2), 668–681.
Keller, H., Voelker, S., & Yovsi, R. D. (2005). Conceptions of parenting in different cultural communities: The case of West
African Nso and Northern German women. Social Development, 14(1), 158-180.
Mastin, J. D., & Vogt, P. (2016). Infant engagement and early vocabulary development: a naturalistic observation study of
Mozambican infants from 1;1 to 2;1. Journal of Child Language, 43(2), 235–264.
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0305000915000148
Techniques that will be used by the student:
This empirical work will consist of analyzing mother and infant behavior on a video corpus of Ethiopian and
French mother-infant pairs. The Ethiopian mother-infant pairs were collected at a field site in a rural village in
Southern Ethiopia. The French sample was collected in an urban location in Southern France. Various behavioral
sampling methods will be implemented on the video corpus. Videos will be coded on Elan. There is no fieldwork
associated with this project.
Background/skills requested:
The student will have to search and review the literature on the topic and related fields. A willingness to quickly
learn the basics of language development is required. The student should possess good statistical skills and be
autonomous in the R environment.
INQUIRY AND APPLICATION:
Please send an email to marie.bourjade@univ-tlse2.fr with questions and/or a CV and a motivation
statement. We will consider applications from students with a background in biology, psychology and
anthropology. Supervision will be in English and French. Writing can be in English or French.
TERMS OF APPOINTMENT:
Start January 2021 – End June 2021. Student allowance (i.e., gratification) is provided in accordance with
French legislation.