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Conceptual communication before and beyond spoken language
Poster Session B, Wednesday, September 30, 4:30 - 6:30 pm, Wangari Maathai
This poster is part of the Sandbox Series.
Ambra Ferrari1,2, Roberta Hajdu2, Matilde Barucci2, Mariapaola Scuderi3, Francesco Pavani2,4, Eugenio Parise2; 1SISSA - Scuola Internazionale Superiore di Studi Avanzati, 2CIMeC - Center for Mind/Brain Sciences, University of Trento, 3BabySigns Italia, 4CIRCLeS - Interuniversity Research Centre "Cognition, Language and Deafness"
Language is our most powerful cognitive and cultural tool, through which we can shape one another’s minds, share information, and build knowledge collectively across generations. This is crucial during development: infants build knowledge to the extent that adults provide appropriate scaffolding, i.e., when the teaching material is tuned to the infant’s current understanding. At present, it is hotly debated whether we can communicate and share knowledge with infants only through spoken words or whether gestures offer equal scaffolding. This possibility may be realized through “baby sign”, a gesture-based training that encourages the use of conventionalised manual gestures to convey concepts during everyday interactions. As a result, these symbolic gestures represent a potential means for exchanging meanings in the preverbal infant/adult dyad. However, this exciting scenario cannot be proved by the existing research, which shows contrasting views that only rely on the indirect interpretation of infant behaviour. Using EEG, the present project is the first to directly measure neural activity from the baby brain and establish a quantitative comparison with the adult brain to verify whether the two share a common multimodal conceptual space, essential for exchanging meanings before and beyond spoken language. To this aim, the study examines the semantic comprehension of symbolic gestures combining EEG with a semantic priming paradigm. In each trial, a prime (videoclip of an actress producing a baby sign; e.g., “cat”) is followed by a congruent or incongruent target (cat or ball image). Stimuli are selected via the BabySigns Italia standard catalogue used by families for training their babies at home. The N400 component, time-locked to the onset of the target image, represents a direct neural marker of semantic comprehension, allowing us to verify whether symbolic gestures carry meanings for preverbal infants. Further, adult participants (the babies’ caregivers) are used as a benchmark against which to compare the latency and topography of the infant N400 effect, enhancing interpretability. A preliminary pilot study confirmed the feasibility of the experiment. We tested five healthy full-term 9-month-old infants raised in Italian monolingual families (mean age = 266 days; range = 234-296 days, one male) and five healthy adults (mean age = 35 years; range = 25-42 years, one male). Caregivers attended a BabySigns workshop at least three months before they participated in the EEG session and became proficient with baby sign by regularly using it with their babies at home. All infants showed typical communicative development, as confirmed by the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventory. Results showed a more negative N400 amplitude for incongruent than congruent trials over centro-parietal electrodes, in line with typical N400 semantic effects, in both infants and adults. While data collection and analyses are currently ongoing, these preliminary findings positively suggest that preverbal infants may access semantic meaning through symbolic gestures, similarly to adults. If confirmed, this evidence will provide an unprecedented understanding of the origins of human language and symbolic cognition, which are essential hallmarks of our species.
Topic Areas: Language Development/Acquisition, Multisensory or Sensorimotor Integration