Feeling the Way to Words: Parents’ Speech and Touch Cues Highlight Word-To-World Mappings of Body Parts

Abstract

Touch cues might facilitate infants’ early word comprehension and explain the early understanding of body part words. Parents were instructed to teach their infants, 4- to 5-month-olds or 10- to 11-month-olds, nonce words for body parts and a contrast object. Importantly, they were given no instructions about the use of touch. Parents spontaneously synchronized the location and timing of their touches on the infant’s body with the body part nonce word that they were teaching. Their unrelated, mismatched words and touches did not show synchrony. Moreover, when parents used this synchronized speech and touch input, infants looked more frequently to the target locations on their bodies and to their parent’s faces compared to when the input was mismatched or only speech. Similar to other research on parents’ use of speech and gesture input, these results show how parents use multimodal input and raise the possibility that infants may use touch cues to segment and map early words.

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