Use of Baby Signs Emblems in infants attending daycare centers: evidence of transfer from educators to infants

Ecco il testo con le citazioni integrate correttamente secondo lo stile autore-anno, basato sulla tua bibliografia numerata: Gestures are precursors of language skills and serve as important tools for interactions with adults and peers in early childhood (Volterra et al., 2020; Novack & Goldin-Meadow, 2017). Educational programs promoting the Baby Signs Emblems (BSE) between adults and infants - also known as Baby Signs programs - have been proposed to educators in infant daycare centers (Vallotton et al., 2014). Within these contexts, gesture and speech are frequently produced simultaneously, giving rise to bimodal communicative practices that can enhance interactional dynamics and provide linguistic and social scaffolding for infants (Goldin-Meadow, 2014). We investigated whether BSE-based communication training delivered to educators in daycare centers transfers to infants and affects their gestural repertoire. The study involved 10 daycare centers in Italy, randomly assigned to three groups differing in the training provided to educators: training to BSE use (BS new group), training on communication and language without BSE (CL group), and no training (NT group). A further group of daycare centers that had been using BSE for several years was also included (BS expert group). In total, 183 infants (mean age = 23.6 months, SD = 7.7) participated in the study. 58 hours of video recordings were collected during mealtime and free play, and all infants’ manual gestures were coded as representational (including iconic, metaphoric, and deictic), emblems, and pragmatic gestures (Sotaro & Emmorey, 2023). Results show that during mealtime, 73% of infants in BS new produced at least one BSE, corresponding to 17% of the recorded time. Nevertheless, BSE frequency was lower in BS new than in BS expert (p = 0.009). During free play, BSE production was lower in both groups (30% of infants in the expert group and 16% in the BS new group), reflecting more individualistic activities and fewer communicative exchanges during free play compared to the shared and structured context of mealtime. Additional analyses showed that infants’ BSE were more often produced spontaneously than by imitation, and were more frequently not accompanied by speech than produced bimodally. When considering overall gestural production, infants in BS new and BS expert groups used more gestures than all other groups. Importantly, when BSE were excluded, this difference remained significant only with respect to the NT group (p < .001), while the CL group showed similar levels to BS new. Across groups, representational gestures were more frequent than emblems and pragmatic gestures (p < .001). These were particularly frequent in BS new and CL groups, and the majority consisted of deictic gestures, in line with the typical patterns of early communicative development. Overall, these findings show that BSE-based educational programs are integrated into infants’ gestural repertoires. Moreover, they suggest that providing educators with training focused on communication - whether or not it includes BSE - may influence infants’ gestural communicative strategies.