Joint attention is an important social-communicative skill that supports early language development, yet little is known about how tactile communication contributes to establishing shared attention in parent-child interactions involving children who are D/deaf and hard-of-hearing (DHH). Previous research suggests that parents of children who are DHH use multimodal communication, including touch, more frequently than parents of children with hearing in the typical range (CTH). This study investigated whether maternal touch is temporally coordinated with joint attention behaviors and whether these patterns differ between parent-child dyads with children who are DHH and CTH. Video-recorded parent-child interactions were coded in Datavyu for touch events and joint attention behaviors, and temporal alignment between these behaviors was analyzed. Parent-child dyads with children who are DHH showed significantly greater temporal alignment between touch and pre-joint attention than CTH dyads, with indirect touch demonstrating the largest group difference. These findings suggest that touch, particularly indirect touch through objects, may play an important role in establishing shared attention before joint attention. This study highlights tactile engagement as a potentially important adaptive behavior of DHH parent-child interactions, which may inform evidence-based strategies for parents, educators, and clinicians seeking to support early communication and language development.
