Early engagement and communicative development in a rural indigenous community: An observational study of Wichi infants

TAVERNA, A. S.; WAXMAN, S. R.

París

Workshop; Workshop on Extensive and Intensive Recordings of Children's Language Environment (WEIRCLE); 2015

Laboratoire de Sciences Cognitives et Psycholinguistique (ENS, EHESS, CNRS), Département d'Etudes Cognitives, Ecole Normale Supérieure, PSL Research University

Although in recent decades, developmental psychology has been the epicenter ofan explosion of interest in early social learning, several key issues remain unexplored. Because most investigations have relied predominantly on semi-structured methods in the kinds of engagement typical of infants in Western communities (e.g., mother-child dyads), there is surprising little evidencedocumenting the contexts for social interaction typical of infants from non-Western cultural communities. This may explain why so much recent work focuseson social interactions involving a single adult-infant dyad engaged in explicit wordlearning or joint attention activities. Absent from this corpus is evidence about thebroader range of social interaction contexts available to infants from othercommunities (involving interactions that are typically less explicitly didactic andthat involve more than a single adult-infant pair). To identify the conditions thatsupport social learning in infants and young children across the worlds communities, it is essential that we broaden the empirical base.In our work, we examine social and communicative engagement in everyday lifesituations that are characteristic of infants growing up within the Wichicommunity, a rural indigenous community from the Chaco Forest (northernArgentina). This study is situated within the framework of a broader investigation of language acquisition among the Wichi, for whom their ancestral language remains their native tongue.Our design includes video-recording 8 Wichi infants in the natural course of theirdaily activities. We record each infant at 4-5 points in their first three years of life(12mo; 18mo; 24mo; 36mo; 42 mo). At each point, we record (at least) two 40 minsessions. Typically, these sessions include not only the target infant, but severalothers, including the mother, other adults, other children, domestic animals.Following Mastin (2013) recent analyses of naturalistic investigations, we use ahierarchical system of engagement levels to code for infants´ episodes of both joint attention and non-joint attention. We also code the source and actors in each jointengagement (target infant, mother, other adult, other child) and the relationbetween any infant-directed utterances and the engagement levels. Once coding iscompleted, the data will be exported from ELAN. This rich set of observational datawill permit us to examine social and communicative interaction longitudinally for agiven infant, or cross-sectionally for a given infant age. We hope that these resultswill broaden the scope, and extend the generalizability, of current theories of socialengagement, cognitive development and early social learning.