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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Psychol.
Sec. Cognitive Science
Volume 16 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1516587
This article is part of the Research Topic Risk and Protective Factors, Family Environment and (A)Typical Neurodevelopmental Outcomes - Volume II View all 4 articles
Joint attention and exogenous attention allocation during mother-infant interaction at 12 months associate with 24-month vocabulary composition
Provisionally accepted- 1 University of Pavia, Pavia, Lombardy, Italy
- 2 Neurological Institute Foundation Casimiro Mondino (IRCCS), Pavia, Lombardy, Italy
The present study aimed at exploring how early forms of attention during mother-infant interaction at 12 months (i.e., exogenous attention allocation and joint attention initiation) might modulate individual differences in 24 months language development, in a sample of 46 typically developing children. Findings showed significant negative associations between early life exogenous attention allocation and later vocabulary composition (i.e., predicate percentage). This association was modulated by joint attention initiation: infants displaying lower levels of joint attention initiation showed a negative association between exogenous attention allocation and language development. The findings are suggestive of a complex relationship among different forms of early attention skills and language development in the first two years of life.
Keywords: Distractibility, Infancy, joint attention, Language, vocabulary composition distractibility, Vocabulary composition
Received: 24 Oct 2024; Accepted: 24 Mar 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Capelli, Grumi, Vercellino and Provenzi. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence:
Elena Capelli, University of Pavia, Pavia, 27100, Lombardy, Italy
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