CHAPTER 9

LECTURE EXTENSION

Infants' Coordination of Vocalizations and Facial Expressions
The text indicates that infants begin to make vowel-like noises, called cooing, around 2 months of age, and gradually start babbling at about 4 months. Also discussed is infants' ability to communicate using nonverbal means, such as eye contact, gaze direction, and facial expressions. But to what extent do young infants coordinate their early vocalizations and facial expressions? A recent study by Yale and her colleagues (1999) addressed this question by examining the vocalizations and facial actions of 3- and 6-month-old infants when interacting with their caregivers. Coded facial actions included smiles and anger-distress-sadness facial expressions (for example, lowered brows with tightened lips or a chin raise).

The results showed that infants systematically sequenced their vocalizations and facial expressions using two patterns. First, when two communicative events were temporally associated, one event (either the vocalization or the facial action) tended to be temporally embedded within the other. Second, when a vocalization was temporally associated with a facial action, the vocalization tended to end before the facial action. The authors argue that infants may tend to end their messages with facial expressions rather than vocalizations because vocalizations may serve to draw others' attention to them, whereas facial expressions may communicate to the recipient a clear affective message. Further, vocalization-facial expression coordination occurred with both anger-distress-sadness and smiling facial expressions, but was more prevalent in anger-distress-sadness.

Yale, M. E., Messinger, D. S., Cobo-Lewis, A. B., Oller, D. K., & Eilers, R. E. (1999). An event-based analysis of the coordination of early infant vocalizations and facial actions. Developmental Psychology, 35, 505-513.

LEARNING ACTIVITY

Interviewing Parents About Their Toddler's Early Vocabulary
Ask students to interview one or two parents of a child between 1 and 2 years of age about their toddler's early vocabulary. Parents can be asked to list the words their children produce and the contexts in which they use each of them. Students should look for illustrations of the sensorimotor foundations of early language, the spurt in vocabulary that typically occurs between 18 and 24 months, and early two-word combinations.