Cintia Rodríguez

Universidad Autónoma de Madrid | UAM · Faculty of Psychology

The two first years of life are critical in the development of Executive Functions (EF). However, very little is known about their early manifestations, how they develop, how they relate to other psychological constructions or the status of other people’s influence in this early development. The study of EFs has been carried out through standardise...

Executive functions (EFs) embrace a range of cognitive control processes that allow us to control and direct our own behavior, thoughts, and emotions and to develop complex responses to difficulties. Standardized tasks commonly used to investigate EFs are reviewed. Here, a study is reported of the first challenges that children set for themselves i...

Research on gesture development has mostly focused on home environments. Little is known about early communicative development in other relevant contexts, such as early-year-schools. These settings, rich in diverse educative situations, objects, and communicative partners, provide a contrast to parent–child interactions, complementing our understan...

We consider it necessary to consolidate a developmental theory of Executive Functions. Research based on standardized tasks have limitations that makes it difficult to study and analyze their development with children under the age of two years. To address these issues, we present a constructivist, pragmatic, semiotic, and sociocultural perspective...

The first gestures that children produce intentionally to communicate with others, make sense of the world around them, and control their behavior are ostensive gestures of showing and giving; these are also the first gestures that parents and teachers use to communicate with children and to regulate their behavior in their first months of life. Os...

The origins and early development of Executive Functions (EF) have been closely related to language. The investigation in EF development has been conducted mainly through standardized tasks, in which the researcher determines what the child should do, how and when. Critical voices question the ecological validity of the classic tasks and emphasize...

The genesis of the communication continuum in autism constitutes a key element for understanding its development. Current prospective and longitudinal research studies face this challenge. However, it is suggested that in the construction of shared reference the path of child–object interactions must be analysed from a semiotic and dimensional pers...

Research of the last 30 years showed the importance of music for psychological development. Communicative musicality studies described musical organisations in dyadic interactions (adult–baby). However, other perspectives proposed that, from the beginning of life, there are early triadic interactions (adult–object–baby) that should also be analysed...

Latino children are diagnosed with ASD later in life, usually with more severe symptoms, compared with non-Latino children. Possible reasons for such disparities could be due to lower levels of parent education, lower socioeconomic status and limited knowledge of parents about autism spectrum disorder. Our study proposes lines of research in the ea...

We present a systematic and qualitative review of academic literature on early conceptual development (0–24 months of age), with an emphasis on methodological aspects. The final sample of our review included 281 studies reported in 115 articles. The main aims of the article were four: first, to organise studies into sets according to methodological...

The psychological literature on the development of gestures during the first year of life has been limited. It has mainly focused on the development of pointing at around 11 months of age, considering it the gesture that allows triadic interactions. However, recent studies have argued for the importance of earlier ostensive gestures (showing and gi...

Within developmental psychology, pointing gestures have received a great deal of attention, while ostensive gestures have been overlooked in terms of their emergence and intentionality. In a longitudinal and micro-genetic study with six children at 9, 11, and 13 months of age, we codified gesture production of children within second-by-second data...

Studies on cardinality date back many years, and it remains a current research issue today. Indeed, despite the many findings on the topic, there is still controversy surrounding when and how children understand cardinality. The main studies on this understanding employs the “how many” question in situations involving the quantification of objects,...

It would be chaotic for humans to relate to one another disregarding the functional attributes of objects. Objects are defined by what they are for in everyday life. Communicating in a meaningful and functional way implies a regard for their pragmatic aspects, that is, their practical purposes (Groupe μ, 1992). The functional attributes of objects,...

Adult semiotic mediation in the origin and evolution of the first symbolic uses of objects by infants in contexts of triadic interactions was investigated. Six infant-parent dyads interacting together with ten objects were observed longitudinally from 9 to 15 months of age, with an interval of three months between each observation. The communicativ...

El niño requiere que los adultos les asignen usos canónicos a los objetos en la interacción con ellos para que puedan usarlos posteriormente como simbolos y asi insertarse en la cultura y generar maneras de significar el mundo. El objetivo del presente trabajo es mostrar los cambios en las practicas de uso de los objetos que las diadas mexicanas re...

Conceptual metaphor theory showed, from embodiment, the importance of metaphor as a cognitive process. This influential theory assumes the existence of primitive but powerful mental structures called image schemas. In this paper, we conduct a critical inquiry about these structures from the developmental perspective of the pragmatics of the object...

For decades, the literature on the emergence of triadic interactions considers the end of the first year of life as the time when children become able to communicate with others intentionally about a referent. Prior to that, children only relate in dyads, either with someone else or with an object. However, several researchers claim that referents...

From the end of the first year children begin to self-regulate their own behaviour. Executive Functions are already present. This paper shows evidence — from a longitudinal case study carried out at an infant school — of the beginnings of the functional use of a spoon by an 11-month-old child through self-regulatory processes with non-linguistic se...

Early social development has traditionally been considered more or less in isolation from other topics such as motor, perceptual, and cognitive development. However, this chapter points out how all these aspects of development are intertwined. An infant is born into a social world in which adults interpret and respond to the earliest behaviours soc...

The role of language as a tool to support the self-regulation has been widely studied, yet there is little evidence on the role of prelinguistic communication in the early development of self-regulation. To address this gap we developed behavioural indicators of preverbal cognitive self-regulation, and described how can parents support it through g...

This paper longitudinally studies the emergence and evolution of the first symbolic uses of objects in Mexican children. We observed eight children in triadic interaction with one of their parents and 10 objects in a semi-structured situation at nine, 12, 15 and 18 months old. The children began to use objects symbolically at 12 months, and the dur...

El presente estudio trata el tema de la segmentación como esencial para la comprensión del número. Es un estudio longitudinal de la interacción entre una niña y su madre, entre los dos y tres años cuando participan en un juego que exige prácticas numéricas. Los resultados muestran el uso de mediadores comunicativos utilizados por la madre que evide...

Abstract: We investigated the process through which children understand the conventional use of numbers in interaction with an adult. We analysed pre- vious semiotic systems that support, transform and adjust to this new semiotic system — the numerical — and we investigated the communicative-educative basis that makes it possible. We conducted an e...

Since the 1980s, numerous laboratory investigations have been arguing that infants are numerically competent. This work presents a critical review of this line of research. We propose that despite the repertoire of numerical abilities attributed to infants and the seemingly natural character of the very first numbers in the numerical series, the se...

Adults mediate the relationship between material reality and children, according to functional units of cultural relevance. This paper explores early development of semiotic systems in infants, analyzing rhythmic, sonorous and melodic components, which enable adult-child interaction with and about objects. The triads (with sonorous and non-sonorous...

Alex Gillespie and Flora Cornish draw on the dialogic turn as they consider that, in order to interpret the meaning of an utterance, it is necessary to emphasize its contextual nature. Among other aspects, they address what context is and what is being done while speaking. Taking these two issues as point of departure, it is worth pondering on (1)...

Symbolic uses of objects originate in communicative and triadic contexts (adult-child-object). In this longitudinal study we explore the emergence and development of the first symbolic uses in triadic interaction contexts in a girl with Down syndrome between 12 and 18-months of age. We conducted five sessions of video recording, at 12, 13½, 15, 16½...

In this study, we address the construction of the first symbolic uses of objects in contexts of triadic interaction (adult–child–object). We assume that symbolic productions are based on public rules of the use of objects previously agreed by the community. The first symbols are not rooted in any literal, evident reality, but in shared rules of use...

El papel del lenguaje en la autorregulación ha sido ampliamente estudiado. Sin embargo, hay escasa evidencia sobre la función de autorregulación de los sistemas semióticos prelingüísticos en el desarrollo temprano. Presentamos un estudio de diseño longitudinal para explorar cuándo y cómo los niños/as comienzan a utilizar signos prelingüísticos con...

Tesis doctoral inédita leída en la Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Facultad de Psicología. Fecha de lectura: octubre de 2009 Bibliogr.: p. 379-389

The later Wittgenstein's emphasis on the social usage of language has been very influential in psychology, particularly in language acquisition research. This move toward a pragmatic position should also be applied to gestures in pre-linguistic children and to objects in the everyday contexts of use. The shared ‘forms of life’ presupposed by langua...

En este artículo analizamos el recorrido de la obra de Ángel Rivière desde que comienza a introducir una lectura semiótica, con la influencia de Leslie o Bateson, hasta que su interés por los signos, desde las tesis de Vygotski, se vuelve sistemático para comprender el desarrollo temprano. A través de la interpretación semiótica de Rivière reflexio...

One of the most fascinating phenomena in early development is that babies not only understand signs others direct to them and later use them to communicate with others, but they also come to direct the same signs towards themselves in a private way. Private gestures become "tools of thought". There is a considerable literature about private languag...

Del ritmo al símbolo ofrece una visión del desarrollo cognitivo temprano que contrasta con el sujeto paciente, el “gran ojo que mira” sin actuar y reacciona a los estímulos que se le presentan, ignorando el cuerpo, la comunicación con los otros o toda influencia educativa como causa del desarrollo cognitivo temprano. Del ritmo al símbolo se dirige...

Comment le bébé construit-il la réalité? Comment apprend-il à connaître et à utiliser conventionnellement les objets qui l'entourent durant la période qui précède l'avènement du langage? En s'interrogeant plus précisément sur la question de l'appropriation des usages canoniques des objets par le bébé entre 7 et 13 mois dans l'interaction avec autru...

En este artículo exploramos los orígenes de los símbolos hacia el final del primer año de vida. El argumento que recorre este trabajo es que las reglas sobre las que se apoyan los primeros usos simbólicos realizados por los niños, provienen de las reglas que gobiernan los usos de objetos que ya son convencionales, de modo que por debajo de los prim...

Representations in children through sémiotic processes Based on work on canonical use of object in 7 to 13 month-old infants, the authors argue for a social origin of psychological functions in the preverbal period. Drawing on the theoretical work of Vygotsky, they propose to extend the concept ofsemiotic mediation to the prelinguistic behaviors a...

En este artículo se critica la postura dualista del desarrollo que separa el conocimiento físico del social como dos dominios que se adquieren por separado y que se refieren al objeto por un lado y a los sujetos y sus interacciones por otro. El argumento se centra en la idea de que el conocimiento del objeto por parte del sujeto está necesariamente...

Tesis doctoral inédita de la Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Facultad de Psicología, Departamento de Psicología Evolutiva. Fecha de lectura: 3-6-1996 Bibliografía: p.363-369

Based upon a reflection on the social origins of human psychological functions the authors propose an analysis of the transmission-appropriation of object uses by the 7 to 13 month old child through interaction with the adult termed baby-object-adult triadic interaction. The analysis is based on Peirce’s semiotics. Semiotic processes involved in th...

This paper examines the different functions of a child�s gesture at the prelinguistic level. Specifically this involves extending an object towards an adult without having the intention of giving the object. Among these functions, it is of interest to underline a) the adult�s role as regulator of the child�s action once the explicit request has bee...

Les AA. s'inspirent de la these vygotskienne quant a l'origine sociale des fonctions psychiques humaines, en particulier de la conception selon laquelle la relation entre l'homme et la realite n'est jamais directe mais socialement mediatisee. Si, dans le developpement psychique, Vygotski analyse le role des systemes de signes, notamment langagiers,...

Tesis doctoral inédita leída en la Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Facultad de Medicina. Departamento de Pediatría. Fecha de lectura: 12 de Junio de 2009