Social psychology

The purpose of this study was to examine whether infants ’ social attention, as well as their joint attention behaviors uniquely predicted emerging language abilities. This longitudinal study examined attention regulation skills, joint attention behaviors, infants ’ expressive/receptive language (current), emerging communication abilities at 16- and 17-month-old (time 1); expressive/receptive language (subsequent) at 18- 19-month-old (time 2). Infants ’ sustained attention was measured by their attention control to a central stimulus in the presence of a display with their matched voice tracks were used to separately measure infants ’ attention regulation to different types of events. Infants ’ sustained attention was estimated by their latencies away from central stimuli to distracters, as well as their fixation duration and gaze figure toward the distracter was the only variable that significantly negatively predicted current expressive vocabulary. Initiating joint attention was observed to significantly predict infants’ abilities in current receptive vocabulary. The emerging language communication abilit