Joint attention through the hands: Investigating the timing of object labeling in dyadic social interaction

Previous studies of joint attention and its´ role in language learning have focused on eye-gaze cues. The goal of the present study is to discover fine-grained patterns of joint hand activities in child-parent social interaction that facilitate successful word learning. To this end, we address the following three topics: 1) quantifying joint manual actions between the parent and the child and in particular how the child follows the parent´s bid of attention through manual actions; 2) discovering the timings between joint manual actions and object naming events; and 3) linking those timings with language learning results. Multiple high-resolution data streams were examined for episodes involving object-labeling events that either preceded or followed joint attentional focus as established through the hand actions of the dyad. Our findings suggest that the success of word learning through social interaction depends on the specific timing between follow-in joint hand activities and naming events.