Unpacking Multimodal Verb Input in English: Insights From Typically Developing Infants and Those Who are Deaf and Hard of Hearing

Abstract

This study offers a descriptive account of multimodal verb input to Deaf and Hard of Hearing (DHH) and Typically Developing (TD) infants across crucial points in verb acquisition. Using the North American English Ambrose (2016) corpus, we analysed mother-infant play interactions at 13 and 22 months, and explored caregivers' verb input, its combination with caregiver action and in response to infant action. Across development, mothers increased the frequency and diversity of their verb input while retaining high levels of multimodal scaffolding such that verbs were tightly coordinated with actions. Multimodal verb input varied as a function of age and agent. When producing verbs in response to infant actions, mothers of younger infants used verbs that labeled the actions that infants were performing, whereas when infants were older, mothers more often used verbs that were related to aspects of the actions performed but did not label them. In verb input that accompanied their own actions, mothers produced more actions that were related to the meaning of the verbs more frequently than actions that depicted the meaning of the verbs, and this was more common in the input to older infants. Crucially, while verb input to DHH infants was less lexically diverse, it was more frequently multimodally packaged suggesting that mothers of DHH infants scaffold verb input by reducing its complexity and increasing its referentiality with multimodal cues that can facilitate the construction of verb meaning.