ZASx Talk: Conversationalist in the Making: Mapping the Landscape of Infant Communicative Development in the First Year of Life

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Abstract

Human interactions are based on time-coordinated reciprocity. From metaphors like "serve-and-return" to "it takes two to tango," it seems intuitive what it means to be a partner in interaction. Infants engage in social exchanges from early on, much to the delight of their caregivers. Yet, the nature of infant–caregiver interactions in the early months is markedly different from adult conversations. This raises an important question: when do infants begin to actively participate in social interactions, and how does this developmental process unfold in both typical and atypical trajectories?

In this talk, I will present findings from several longitudinal studies conducted in Poland and Germany that explore early dyadic communication between infants and caregivers. I will discuss how contextual factors shape (proto)conversations and motor behaviors, and how infants’ motor-vocal coordination changes over the first year of life. I will also share preliminary results from a study using head-mounted eye-tracking to examine infants’ visual attention  during free-flowing interactions, comparing pre-sitting and independently sitting infants. Finally, I will present two longitudinal case studies on vocal development in twin infants with genetic syndromes.

Bio

Zuzanna Laudańska is a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at Heidelberg University Hospital. She earned her PhD in September 2024 from the Institute of Psychology at the Polish Academy of Sciences. Her doctoral research focused on the development of motor and vocal coordination in infancy, using a dynamic systems approach. Her work explores early speech-language acquisition and dyadic communication through a multimodal lens. She has participated in interdisciplinary projects that apply advanced data analysis methods to infant behavior, bridging developmental psychology with complexity science.

For more details, the Teams invitation or if you would like to present your work at Leibniz-ZASx Talks: Phonetics & Phonology Series, please contact zas.xtalks@leibniz-zas.de.