Mousley, Victoria Leigh Stephen;
(2022)
Effects of early language experience on social communicative development in toddlers.
Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).
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Abstract
Development of toddlers’ social communication is linked to language experience. Research with monolinguals has shown that developments in speech perception, domain-general visual attention, and face processing are sensitive to early language environments. Less is known about these effects amongst young children learning two spoken languages from birth ("simultaneous bilinguals"). Further, whilst communicative patterns in parent-child interaction are thought to be related to toddlers' cognitive and linguistic outcomes, it remains unknown whether these links generalise to bilinguals. To address these gaps, data was collected from 15- to 18-month-old monolinguals and bilinguals on a range of tasks including eye-tracking paradigms, observational parent-child interaction protocol, Mullen Scales of Early Learning, MacArthur-Bates Communicative Inventories ("CDI"), and language background interviews. CDI data were also collected when the children turned 24 months old. The studies in this thesis demonstrated that toddlers’ performance on non-native speech perception (Chapter 5) and domain-general visual attention (Chapter 6) did not differ between monolinguals and bilinguals. Across all toddlers, speed of visual rule learning related to receptive vocabulary size (Chapter 6). Experience-sensitive effects emerged on static and dynamic face processing (Chapter 7). Bilingual toddlers made their first looks to static faces over non-faces more rapidly than did monolingual toddlers and, whilst viewing dynamic social scenes, dwelled longer per look to the mouths of faces than did monolinguals. Across all monolinguals and bilinguals, patterns of connected visual attention that occurred spontaneously during free-play with caregivers significantly predicted toddlers’ concurrent cognitive outcomes (Chapter 8). Further, well-timed spoken language input from parents during connected visual attention with their children significantly predicted toddlers’ concurrent receptive language skills (only monolinguals analysed; Chapter 8). Overall, this thesis furthers the field’s understanding of the relationships between early language experience and social communicative development in the first two years of life.
| Type: | Thesis (Doctoral) |
|---|---|
| Qualification: | Ph.D |
| Title: | Effects of early language experience on social communicative development in toddlers |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | Copyright © The Author 2022. Original content in this thesis is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) Licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/). Any third-party copyright material present remains the property of its respective owner(s) and is licensed under its existing terms. Access may initially be restricted at the author’s request. |
| Keywords: | bilingualism, deafness, toddler development, face processing, parent-child interaction, speech processing, visual attention, eye-tracking |
| UCL classification: | UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences > Div of Psychology and Lang Sciences UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences UCL |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10147417 |
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