How do 9-month-old infants attain joint engagement when interacting with their mothers?. The role of maternal attentión-directing strategies.

Abstract

The infant's participation on Coordinated joint Engagement episodes facilitates word learning anci the development of social competence skills.. To know how low socioeconomic status infants attain Coordinated Joint Engagement episodes is particularly important considering their lower vocabulary development compared with the high SES group. Moreover, little is known about how specific maternal behaviors may bolster the infant's capability to participate in Coordinated Joint Engagement episodes and in tum, the development of joint attention skills. The objective of this study was to determine the temporal relation between maternal Attention Directing Strategies and the infant's attainment of Coordinated Joint Engagement states at fine months of age, on a low socioeconomic status sample. For that purpose, a free play activity of 33 dyads was sequentially analyzed, a method that aliows revealing the temporal relation between the behaviors involved in an interaction. The general hypothesis —that the adequacy of Attention Directing Strategies for the infant to attain Coordinated Joint Engagement episodes is relative to the infant's Engagement St ate— was mainly supported by sequential results. On the one hand, Maintaining was the only strategy that typically preceded Coordinated Joint Engagement episodes when the infant was engaged with a person andlor objects. On the other hand, Introducing a focus of attention was indirectly related with the onset of Coordinated Joint Engagement, by first preceding the onset of Supported Joint Engagement. However, when each part of those relations was tested as an entire sequence, results did not support the hypothesis. Low frequencies could explain the lack of evidence for the last entire sequence hypothesized. It is suggested that a) Maintaining, by releasing attention resources of the infant, would foster, and b) Introducing, by offering structured ways of action to the infant, would lead to, Coordinated Joint Engagement episodes. Implications of results for intervencions aimed at reducing socioeconomic inequities in early cognitive development are discussed.