 Joint attention  Verbal development  Non-verbal language development  Theory of mind  Pro-social communication  Conversational skills.  How to take a language sample

 Communication involves encoding, transmitting, and decoding messages  Communication involves  A message  A sender who expresses the message  A receiver who responds to the message  Functions of communication  Narrating  Explaining/informing  Requesting  Expressing

Language is a formalized code that a group of people use to communicate The five dimensions of language:  Phonology -Rules determining how sounds can be sequenced  Morphology -Rules for the meaning of sounds (e.g., un, pro, con)  Syntax -Rules for a language’s grammar  Semantics - Rules for the meaning of words  Pragmatics -Rules for communication (prosody, gestures, intonation)  Classification system of words: nouns, verbs, prepositions, adjectives, adverbs, etc. Mean length of utterances (MLU) - Average length of a sample 100 of utterances

Speech is the oral production of language  Speech sounds are the product of four related processes:  Respiration -Breathing that provides power  Phonation -Production of sound by muscle contraction  Resonation -Sound quality shaped by throat  Articulation -Formation of recognizable speech by the mouth Mean length of utterances (MLU) - Average length of a sample 100 child utterances; computed by dividing the total number of morphemes in the sample by the number of utterances

 Most children follow a relatively predictable sequence in their acquisition of speech and language  Birth to 6 months: Communication by smiling, crying, and babbling  7 months to 1 year: Babbling becomes differentiated  1 to 1.6 years: Learns to say several words  1.6 to 2 years: Word “spurt” begins  2 to 3 years: Talks in sentences, vocabulary grows  3 years on: Vocabulary grows  Knowledge of normal language development can help determine whether a child is developing language at a slower-than-normal rate or whether the child shows an abnormal pattern of language development 9-3

 “Two people actively sharing attention with respect to an object or event and monitoring each other’s attention to that object or event” (Jones & Carr, 2004, p.13)  Example: Kitten runs into the room and 3-year-old girl smiles and then looks at her mother and points at the cat  Other terms for JA:  Joint visual attention  Commenting  Indicating  Social referencing  Gaze following  Monitoring  Protodeclaratives  Protoimperatives  Coordinated joint engagement

 Develops about the end of 1 st year – 2 forms:  Responding to another person’s directive attention – develops at end of 1 st year  At months, infants begin to “check back” and look at the person after first looking at the object  Initiating attention of another person to the object or event  Gaze shifts between object and familiar person  Adults usually respond by labeling object or event  Later combined with gestures, verbalizations, pointing, reaching, showing  By the middle of the 2 nd year, joint attention is well-developed

 Specific cognitive ability to understand others as intentional agents  Interpret their behaviour  Attribute mental states  Form theories of their intentions, desires and beliefs  Allows prediction Reproduced from REF. 72 © 2000 Elsevier Science

 Evolutionary approach to theory of mind  Selective advantages for organisms with an ability to interpret and predict behaviour on the basis of mental states  Provides the ‘ why?’ and facilitates prediction Perrett and Emery (1994) Direction of Attention Detector Mutual Attention Mechanism Baron-Cohen (1994) Eye Direction and Intentionality Detectors Theory of Mind Module

 Detect the presence of eye-like stimuli  Present in a large number of species  Visual modality  Detect and represent eye direction as an “Agent” seeing the Self or something else  Process dyadic representations  Agent-relation-Self, Agent-relation-Object  Agent 1 -relation-Agent 2, Self-relation-Object

 Represent if the Self and another agent are attending to the same object or event  Triadic relationships  Agent and self are both attending to same object  Self-relation-(Agent-relation-Object)  Self-relation-(Agent 1 -relation-Agent 2 ) Links ID to EDD –Allows eye direction to be read in terms of volitional states