Awards
Best Poster Award
FIRST PRIZE
200 euro Book Voucher generously offered by Springer Nature and the Book Series Interdisciplinary Evolution Research - Series Editor: Nathalie Gontier (The Applied Evolutionary Epistemology Lab, University of Lisbon)
Pecora G., Focaroli V., Paoletti M., Ciolli M., Iaboni E., Palladino N., Di Prete A., Farrow C., Shapiro L., Galloway A., Chiarotti F., Caravale B., Gastaldi S., Addessi E. & Bellagamba F. / Self-feeding and intentional communication during the meal in 12-month-old infants
Infants who are exposed - between 6 and 12 months of age - to a baby-led weaning approach (BLW) have the opportunity to manipulate, grasp, chew and independently eat earlier than children who are exposed to a parent-led weaning approach (PLW) – in which they are fed purée food on a spoon. Eating independently creates more opportunities to practice fine-motor skills involved in self-feeding compared to the experience of being spoon-fed by the caregiver. We tested the hypothesis that 12-month-old infants with more independent eating skills are also more advanced in their gestural and vocal communication, as both self-feeding and intentional communication involve the use of goal-directed actions. Naturalistic interactions occurring during a typical meal between 58 mothers and their one-year-old infants were recorded. Mothers also completed the Italian short form of the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories (Word and Gestures) to assess comprehension, productive vocabulary and gestures (Caselli et al., 2015). From the observational sessions we coded: (i) the frequency of self-feeding episodes, in which the infant picked up and chewed food using hands or cutlery (ii) the frequency of infant’s deictic and referential gestures as well as the frequency of simple vocalizations, protowords and words (iii) the frequency of maternal child-directed utterances. The infant’s use of deictic gestures (pointing, showing, offering, requesting and taking) during the meal was associated with the frequency of self-feeding, with the number of maternal child-directed utterances, and with the duration of breastfeeding. Moreover, the frequency of deictic gestures was higher in girls and in infants with siblings. The infant’s production of protowords and words was associated with the number of maternal child-directed utterances and with a self-reported measure of fine-motor skill. Finally, self-reported productive vocabulary was associated with the frequency of self-feeding, with the number of maternal child-directed utterances and with a self-reported measure of fine-motor skill. These findings have relevant implications for promoting the dissemination of infant feeding practices alternative to parent-led spoon-feeding.
SECOND PRIZE
A volume from the Book Series Interdisciplinary Evolution Research: Biosemiotics and Evolution. The Natural Foundations of Meaning and Symbolism
Fiala V., Szala A., Placiński M., Poniewierska A., Schmeichel A., Żywiczyński P., Stefańczyk M. & Wacewicz S. / Human conversational behaviour: Language use in regard to social and non-social topics.
In their 1997 study, Dunbar and colleagues established that "conversation about social and personal topics" accounts for about two-thirds of the time spent on conversation. This finding was seen as consequential for theorizing about human cognitive evolution (e.g. Dunbar 1997), as it helped motivate the influential Social Brain theory and the “gossip” theory of language origin. However, it is not clear whether the theoretical importance of this “two-thirds” estimate actually corresponds to the strength of its evidential basis, which is undermined by numerous methodological limitations of the Dunbar et al. (1997) study. In particular, the authors relied on a relatively small number of conversations (N = 45), collected exclusively in open public environments, and from a sample of participants with a very limited demographic and geographic distribution. Secondly, their definition and operationalisation of “social topics” was opaque, as was its connection to the proposed adaptive functions of language. Finally, the term “gossip”, used liberally by Dunbar et al. as a near synonym to “conversation on social topics”, is itself vague and should be used cautiously (Dores Cruz et al. 2021).
Below we report an ongoing study targeted at addressing Dunbar et al.’s (1997) question with a new set of linguistic-analytic tools and with a more rigorous conceptual approach to “social topics”. Our source data is a corpus of 539 colloquial conversations (Pęzik, 2014) between the speakers of Polish recruited from a broad variety of backgrounds (i.e. ages, genders, and education levels); the conversations are transcribed as written text automatically divided into rows that roughly correspond to conversational turns. Each line is currently being coded by two native Polish speakers for its main topic category: we distinguish one category of “non-social” content (not relating to people) and three categories of social continent, i.e. relating to (1) participants of the conversation, (2) people within the conversant’s extended social circle but not present in the conversation, (3) other people. This coding scheme is based on our preliminary study (Szala et al. 2022). As in Dunbar et al. (1997), the main result of interest is the proportion of social to non-social content in conversation. However, we plan exploratory analyses to determine whether i. education, ii. gender, and iii. age predicts the likelihood of engaging in social topics (categories 1–3 treated jointly), as well as whether these demographic variables predict discussing specific categories. Full results will be available for the conference.
