Early Mother-Infant Coordination and Later Language Development in Infants at High and Low Risk for Autism Spectrum DisorderNorthrup, Jessie (2018) Early Mother-Infant Coordination and Later Language Development in Infants at High and Low Risk for Autism Spectrum Disorder. Doctoral Dissertation, University of Pittsburgh. (Unpublished) This is the latest version of this item.
AbstractThe overarching goal of this research was to describe the development of the dyadic coordination of vocalization and gaze behavior between mothers and infants over the first year of life in infants at heightened vs. low risk for autism spectrum disorder. In addition to describing developmental trajectories of behavior, the study aimed to increase our understanding of how coordination is established and develops by investigating how measures of individual vocal and gaze behavior and their coordination within and across modalities related to one another concurrently and across time, and by relating early interactive behaviors to later language development. Thirty dyads were recorded playing together with a standard set of toys when infants were 3, 6, 9, and 12 months of age, and mother and infant vocalization and gaze behaviors were coded from these videos on a moment-to-moment basis. Coordination was analyzed using both cross-recurrence quantitative analysis and event-based measures of analysis. Hierarchical linear modeling was used to examine developmental trajectories of vocalization and gaze coordination as well as the multi-modal coordination of these two behaviors. Results indicated that coordination of the timing of vocalization and gaze behaviors is early emerging and supported by both mother and infant behavior, but that relations between coordination across domains and ages are not straightforward. Furthermore, contrary to expectations, few risk status differences were found, and there was no evidence that early coordination predicted later language development. Taken together, these findings paint a complex picture of how dyadic gaze and vocal coordination develop. Rather than coordination emerging due to individual characteristics of mothers and infants within dyads, the data suggest that coordination emerges as a feature of the larger interaction between infant developmental ability and behavior, mother behavior, and the overarching context of the interaction. The results underscore the importance of understanding mother and infant behavior during social interactions as transactional and multi-modal, and also provide new evidence that coordination of behaviors does not develop in a simple, linear fashion, nor is it driven primarily by parent and infant traits. Share
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