Lauren Adamson

Lauren Bernstein Adamson (June 21, 1948 – December 31, 2021)^[1] was a developmental psychologist known for her research on communicative development, parent-child interaction, and joint attention in infants with typical and atypical developmental trajectories.^[2] She was a Regents' Professor Emerita of Psychology at Georgia State University.^[3]

Adamson was a Fellow of the American Psychological Association (Division 7, Developmental Psychology) and also a Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science. She was the author of the book Communication Development During Infancy^[4] and co-editor of Communication and Language Acquisition: Discoveries from Atypical Development (with Mary Ann Romski).^[5]

Biography

Lauren Bernstein was born in Saranac Lake, New York,^[6] and grew up in Milford, Connecticut.^[1]

Adamson received her

She was married to Walter L. Adamson, the Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of History at Emory University.^[10]

Research

Adamson's research program focused on the development of engagement of infants and young children with their social partners. She conducted collaborative research with

Adamson and her colleagues also conducted intervention studies to support children's language development. One of their co-authored articles "Randomized Comparison of Augmented and Nonaugmented Language Interventions for Toddlers With Developmental Delays and Their Parents"[15] received the ASHA Editor's Award for best paper published in 2010 in the Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research.^[16] The research concluded that augmented communication was more beneficial in supporting vocabulary development in children with developmental delays than interventions that used only spoken communication.

Representative publications

• Adamson, L. B., Bakeman, R., & Deckner, D. F. (2004). The development of symbol‐infused joint engagement. Child Development, 75(4), 1171–1187.
• Adamson, L. B., Bakeman, R., Deckner, D. F., & Romski, M. (2009). Joint engagement and the emergence of language in children with autism and Down syndrome. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 39(1), 84–96.
• Adamson, L. B., & Frick, J. E. (2003). The still face: A history of a shared experimental paradigm. Infancy, 4(4), 451–473.
• Bakeman, R., & Adamson, L. B. (1984). Coordinating attention to people and objects in mother-infant and peer-infant interaction. Child Development, 55(4), 1278–1289.
• Barr, R. G., Konner, M., Bakeman, R., & Adamson, L. (1991). Crying in! Kung San infants: A test of the cultural specificity hypothesis. Developmental Medicine & Child Neurology, 33(7), 601–610.
• Tronick, E., Als, H., Adamson, L., Wise, S., & Brazelton, T. B. (1978). The infant's response to entrapment between contradictory messages in face-to-face interaction. Journal of the American Academy of Child Psychiatry, 17(1), 1–13.

References