2024/07/25 by Julia A. Venditti, Rachel Elkin, Rondeline Michelle Williams +3 · 1 voice · 6 citations
Health Professions · Psychology · #Child and Animal Learning Development #Cognitive psychology #Contingency #Developmental psychology #Infant Health and Development #Language Development and Disorders #Psychology #Social learning #Social psychology #Stimulus (psychology)
paper · pdf · doi:10.1111/infa.12614
published in Infancy 30(1), e12614 (Wiley)
openalex publication_date 2024/07/25 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/06
What environmental regularities support infant communicative learning from social interactions? We propose that infants allocate their attention toward and learn from external events that are contingent on their own behaviors. We tested the robustness of the influence of contingency on communicative learning by using a non-biological stimulus, a remote-controlled car, as the social partner. The car approached infants and produced a speech sound either contingently to infants' vocalizations or on a yoked schedule. Two additional groups had an unfamiliar human experimenter as their social partner in contingent and yoked control conditions. We assessed whether infants formed expectations about their partner's responsiveness to their vocalizations. Expectations made based on contingent responsiveness would support the role of contingency in promoting plasticity in early communicative learning. Infants across all conditions increased their vocalization rates when their partner paused in responding, suggesting that they expected their vocalizations to influence their partners' behavior. Infants vocalized significantly more to the social partner than their caregiver if they received contingent rather than yoked responses from the social partner, regardless of if the partner was a human or non-biological agent. Contingent responses to prelinguistic vocalizations facilitated the formation of expectations for interactivity of social partners.