Infant-directed song potentiates infants' selective attention to adults' mouths over the first year of life.

The mechanisms by which infant-directed (ID) speech and song support language development in infancy are poorly understood, with most prior investigations focused on the auditory components of these signals. However, the visual components of ID communication are also of fundamental importance for language learning: over the first year of life, infants' visual attention to caregivers' faces during ID speech switches from a focus on the eyes to a focus on the mouth, which provides synchronous visual cues that support speech and language development. Caregivers' facial displays during ID song are highly effective for sustaining infants' attention.

Child language and autism diagnosis impact hierarchical temporal structure of parent-child vocal interactions in early childhood.

Timing is critical to successful social interactions. The temporal structure of dyadic vocal interactions emerges from the rhythm, timing, and frequency of each individuals' vocalizations and reflects how the dyad dynamically organizes and adapts during an interaction. This study investigated the temporal structure of vocal interactions longitudinally in parent-child dyads of typically developing (TD) infants (n = 49; 9-18 months; 48% male) and toddlers with ASD (n = 23; 27.

Excessive and less complex body movement in children with autism during face-to-face conversation: An objective approach to behavioral quantification.

The majority of existing studies investigating characteristics of overt social behavior in individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) relied on informants' evaluation through questionnaires and behavioral coding techniques. As a novelty, this study aimed to quantify the complex movements produced during social interactions in order to test differences in ASD movement dynamics and their convergence, or lack thereof, during social interactions. Twenty children with ASD and twenty-three children with typical development (TD) were videotaped while engaged in a face-to-face conversation with an interviewer.

Complex Communication Dynamics: Exploring the Structure of an Academic Talk.

Communication is a multimodal phenomenon. The cognitive mechanisms supporting it are still understudied. We explored a natural dataset of academic lectures to determine how communication modalities are used and coordinated during the presentation of complex information.

Interacting Timescales in Perspective-Taking.

Through theoretical discussion, literature review, and a computational model, this paper poses a challenge to the notion that perspective-taking involves a fixed architecture in which particular processes have priority. For example, some research suggests that egocentric perspectives can arise more quickly, with other perspectives (such as of task partners) emerging only secondarily. This theoretical dichotomy-between fast egocentric and slow other-centric processes-is challenged here.