Abstract
<p>Touch cues might facilitate infants’ early word comprehension and explain why body part wordsemerge so early. Parents were instructed to teach their infants, 4- to 5-month-olds or 10- to 11-month-olds, nonce words for body parts and a contrast object but were given no instructionsabout the use of touch. Parents spontaneously touched target body parts in close timing touttering the target nonce words. They did not show this alignment for unrelated touches andnonce words. Moreover, when parents used this temporally synchronized speech and touch input,infants looked more frequently to the target locations on their bodies and to their parent’s facescompared to when the input was mismatched or only speech. Similar to other research on parents' use of speech and gesture input, these results show how parents use multimodal speech-touch input and raise the possibility that infants use touch cues to segment and map early words.</p>