Attention-sensitive communication in 13-month-old infants from urban and rural areas in Mozambique: Influence of the recipient’s behaviour and lifestyle

A handful of recent comparative studies indicates that infants’ early pragmatic skills such as attention-sensitive communication (ASC), i.e., the ability to adjust the sensory modality of communicative signals to the recipient’s attention, are affected by the recipient’s behaviour and attentional state. However, no study has been conducted in non-western eco-cultural environments comprising several main caregivers. This study aimed to bridge this gap by examining ASC in 13-month-old Mozambican infants filmed in their homes in rural and urban communities in Mozambique. ASC was assessed through infants’ ability to avoid producing a silent-visual signal towards a visually inattentive recipient (unimodal adjustment) and/or instead employ tactile-or-audible signals in such situations (cross-modal adjustment). An ethological quantitative coding of behaviour was used to test if (1) 13-month-old infants displayed ASC, (2) eco-cultural environments affected ASC abilities, (3) infants addressed their mother or a non-maternal recipient differently, and (4) ASC was of predictive value regarding subsequent language skills. Infants from both rural and urban communities displayed ASC through unimodal and cross-modal adjustments, towards their mother and non-maternal recipients. Infants’ unimodal adjustment was facilitated by the mother’s Infant-Directed Speech (IDS) and physical contact and by non-maternal recipients’ physical contact. Cross-modal adjustment was eased by the removal of the mother’s physical contact and by the removal of non-maternal recipients’ IDS. Cross-modal adjustment abilities predicted a higher vocabulary production score in the MBCDI. These findings indicate that ASC is present in non-western infant development and is scaffolded on recipients’ behaviours, which vary according to the recipient’s status and eco-cultural environment.