Past research has focused expressly on shared visual attention as a primary way mothers share attention with infants and guide early word learning in predominantly middle-income, European American families. Yet contemporary work highlights how parenting and in particular shared attention is culturally derived. The current study investigated other ways that mothers might share attention and signal referents to infants including language, gesture, and physical body orientation in a sample of 62 Mexican heritage mothers and their 14-month-old infants.

Mothers' expression of perceptually redundant cues is also thought to promote language and learning in young infants. To that end maternal coordination was examined including the frame-by-frame analysis of mothers' temporally paired behaviors (e.g., mothers' pointing coupled with talking) in relation to infants' language skills. Further, the positive long-term effects of maternal contingency on infant language are well documented. As mothers respond to their infants' signals (e.g., looking to an infant who vocalizes) they indicate a shared interest and provide meaningful context to infants' visual foci thereby promoting early language. The current study examined maternal contingency based upon mothers' expressions of the four behavior types (gaze, language, gesture, body orientation) in response to infants' visual attention and communication. Sequential analysis was used to test dependencies between pairs of mothers' behaviors (coordination) and mothers' responses to infants' behaviors (contingency).

Preliminary data suggest that mothers' forward body orientation is strongly related to infant language as it is a potentially salient way this group of mothers expressed communicative interest and intention. Mothers coordinated their behaviors in non-random ways as they coupled gesture with looks to infants and with language at higher relative proportions than all other coordinated pairs. Probability statistics revealed how mothers' verbal response to infants' visual attention to mothers predicted language measures. The dynamic and multimodal nature of mother-infant interactions as they unfold in real time and their impact on infant language development is discussed.