Figure
Coefficient estimates from a linear mixed effects model predicting whether an observation was missing.
Source publication
Psychological scientists have become increasingly concerned with issues related to methodology and replicability, and infancy researchers in particular face specific challenges related to replicability: For example, high-powered studies are difficult to conduct, testing conditions vary across labs, and different labs have access to different infant...
Context in source publication
Context 1
... test for effects of moderators on the presence of missing data, we constructed a categorical variable (missing), which was true if a trial had no included looking time (i.e., no looking recorded, a look under 2 s, or no looking because the experiment was already terminated) and false otherwise. We fitted a logistic mixed-effects model with all two-way interactions between method, age, and trial number, using the following specification: Table 5 shows the coefficient estimates from this model. To aid convergence, we centered and scaled age and trial number, and set single-screen presentation as the reference level. ...Similar publications
From the earliest months of life, infants prefer listening to and learn better from infant-directed speech (IDS) compared with adult-directed speech (ADS). Yet IDS differs within communities, across languages, and across cultures, both in form and in prevalence. This large-scale, multisite study used the diversity of bilingual infant experiences to...
Citations
... Specifically, enriched CDS expresses positive caregiver affect (Trainor & Desjardins 2000), thereby strengthening the emotional bond between child and caregiver and contributing positively to children's emotional, physical, and intellectual development. Furthermore, CDS strongly attracts and maintains infants' attention and infants prefer to listen to CDS over adult-directed speech (Frank et al. 2020). Enriched CDS thus draws children's attention to the speaker and, presumably, to what is being said. ...
Language outcomes of children with hearing loss remain heterogeneous despite recent advances in treatment and intervention. Consonants with high frequency, in particular, continue to pose challenges to affected children’s speech perception and production. In this review, the authors evaluate findings of how enriched child-directed speech and song might function as a form of early family-centered intervention to remedy the effects of hearing loss on consonant acquisition already during infancy. First, they review the developmental trajectory of consonant acquisition and how it is impeded by permanent pediatric hearing loss. Second, they assess how phonetic-prosodic and lexico-structural features of caregiver speech and song could facilitate acquisition of consonants in the high-frequency range. Last, recommendations for clinical routines and further research are expressed.
... While the inclusion of all aspects in a singular paper may not be feasible, a consortium such as the ManyBabies Consortium (cf. Frank et al., 2020) or open science projects would be able to integrate far more aspects of turn-taking and create robust, generalizable, and detailed analyses and results. Furthermore, not all of the above longitudinal studies focus on similar or comparable age groups, leaving gaps in the literature in regards to longitudinal development under a single paradigm. ...
Human communication builds on a highly cooperative and interactional infrastructure – conversational turn-taking. Turn-taking is used across many languages and cultures, and is characterized by reciprocal, alternating exchanges and relatively short bursts of information between two or more interactants, avoidance of overlap, and relatively short response times. Although the behavioral principles governing turn-taking in spoken interactions of fully proficient human adults have been investigated for decades, relatively little is known about the acquisition of conversational turn-taking skills and the developmental trajectories of turn-taking comprehension and production. Hence, the aim of the present review was to provide a comprehensive overview of the existing body of work on turn-taking development enabling the extrapolation of developmental milestones and linkage to a recently developed comparative framework of turn-taking. This multi-faceted review will serve as a crucial guide to our current understanding of turn-taking in infancy and childhood. It may instigate a better understanding of turn-taking phylogeny, its evolutionary roots, as well as systematic, quantitative applications across and between species, thereby possibly bridging the existing gap between linguistic and non-linguistic species.
... Newborns orient preferentially to eye contact [7]. Infants in the first months of life show a preference for contingent responsivity [8] and for sources of infant-directed speech [9,10]-a prosodic pattern that typically signals communicative intention directed specifically at babies [11]. By 4.5 months infants preferentially orient to sound patterns of their own name [12]. ...
Adults infer others’ communicative intentions, or lack thereof, from various types of information. Young children may be initially limited to attributions based on a small set of ostensive signals. It is unknown when richer pragmatic inferences about communicative intentions emerge in development. We sought novel type of evidence for such inferences in 17-to-19-month-olds. We hypothesized that toddlers recognize adults’ smartphone use in face-to-face interactions as incongruous with ostension and would rely on this interpretation when inferring the communicative intention of a model in a new imitation task conducted entirely online, dubbed the Sock Ball Task. In Experiment 1 with a between-subject design, we tested the hypothesis by assessing toddlers’ (N = 48) imitation of sub-efficient means and the goal-outcome presented by a model, who interrupted her ostensive demonstration either by using a smartphone or by fiddling with her wristwatch, depending on the condition. We expected toddlers to imitate the sub-efficient means more faithfully in the wristwatch condition than in the smartphone condition. But there was no significant effect of condition on imitation of neither means nor goal. Thus, our hypothesis was not borne out by the results. In Experiment 2, using a within-subject design, we first assessed toddlers’ (N = 24) performance in a no-demonstration baseline and then again after a no-disruption ostensive demonstration. In all three conditions with ostensive demonstration (Experiment 1: smartphone, wristwatch; Experiment 2: no-disruption), toddlers produced the demonstrated sub-efficient means significantly above the baseline level. In the no-disruption condition, goals were also imitated significantly above the baseline level. We conclude that the Sock Ball Task is a valid research tool for studying toddler imitation of novel means actions with objects. We end by discussing suggestions for improving the task in future studies.
... Because of their unique value, large collaborative efforts are being increasingly employed as a tool in the sciences from ecology to medicine, psychology, genomics and particle physics (Borer et al., 2014;Cahn, 1992;Frank et al., 2020;Kiparoglou et al., 2021;Tanjo et al., 2021). The scale and depth of new knowledge arising from these large efforts would simply be impossible to achieve without the contributions of the entire team; every author subtracted creates a loss of data, perspective and spatial extent. ...
The value of large‐scale collaborations for solving complex problems is widely recognized, but many barriers hinder meaningful authorship for all on the resulting multi‐author publications. Because many professional benefits arise from authorship, much of the literature on this topic has focused on cheating, conflict and effort documentation. However, approaches specifically recognizing and creatively overcoming barriers to meaningful authorship have received little attention.
We have developed an inclusive authorship approach arising from 15 years of experience coordinating the publication of over 100 papers arising from a long‐term, international collaboration of hundreds of scientists.
This method of sharing a paper initially as a storyboard with clear expectations, assignments and deadlines fosters communication and creates unambiguous opportunities for all authors to contribute intellectually. By documenting contributions through this multi‐step process, this approach ensures meaningful engagement by each author listed on a publication.
The perception that co‐authors on large authorship publications have not meaningfully contributed underlies widespread institutional bias against multi‐authored papers, disincentivizing large collaborations despite their widely recognized value for advancing knowledge. Our approach identifies and overcomes key barriers to meaningful contributions, protecting the value of authorship even on massively multi‐authored publications.
... Exaggerated pitch in IDS has been found to play an important role in affect regulation of young infants and in the transmission of maternal emotional and communicative intent to the infant (Fernald, 1992;Kitamura & Burnham, 2003;Song, Demuth, & Morgan, 2010;Spinelli & Mesman, 2018;Stern, Spieker, Barnett, & MacKain, 1983). Furthermore, it has been proposed that exaggerated pitch in IDS aids language acquisition by attracting and maintaining infants' attention to the speech stream (Cooper & Aslin, 1990;Fernald & Simon, 1984). ...
The majority of infants with permanent congenital hearing loss fall significantly behind their normal hearing peers in the development of receptive and expressive oral communication skills. Independent of any prosthetic intervention (“hardware”) for infants with hearing loss, the social and linguistic environment (“software”) can still be optimal or sub-optimal and so can exert significant positive or negative effects on speech and language acquisition, with far-reaching beneficial or adverse effects, respectively. This review focusses on the nature of the social and linguistic environment of infants with hearing loss, in particular others’ speech to infants. The nature of this “infant-directed speech” and its effects on language development has been studied extensively in hearing infants but far less comprehensively in infants with hearing loss. Here, literature on the nature of infant-directed speech and its impact on the speech perception and language acquisition in infants with hearing loss is reviewed. The review brings together evidence on the little-studied effects of infant-directed speech on speech and language development in infants with hearing loss, and provides suggestions, over and above early screening and external treatment, for a natural intervention at the level of the carer-infant microcosm that may well optimize the early linguistic experiences and mitigate later adverse effects for infants born with hearing loss.
... A positive way forward in developing interventional therapy that will improve language outcomes in infants with HL would involve studies of mothers' (and others') speech and comparisons of the degree of IDS modifications to infants without prosthetics with various levels of residual hearing, and to infants fitted with cochlear implants versus those fitted with SPEECH TO INFANTS WITH HEARING LOSS 26 hearing aids at various ages of fitting and time since fitting. Such a comprehensive study may be difficult in a single laboratory, but a cross-laboratory corpus of IDS collected under the same conditions in these different populations would be useful in determining the effects of the level and nature of infant hearing on incoming IDS features, and also how these features may be manipulated in clinical applications in order to develop the intervention optimised for infant's linguistic and processing needs (see Frank et al., 2020 for a discussion of multi-lab 'Many Babies' infancy research). Furthermore, the laboratory studies may well be complemented with long-format speech environment recordings using wearable devices (e.g., LENA; LENA Foundation, 2009), which will allow researchers to obtain more speech sample data in naturalistic contexts (Casillas & Cristia, 2019), which can help in gaining a better overall picture of the quantity and quality of speech input that infants with HL receive on a regular basis (e.g., VanDam et al., 2012). ...
This review brings together evidence on the little-studied effects of infant-directed speech on speech and language development in infants with hearing loss, and provides suggestions, over and above early screening and external treatment, for a natural intervention at the level of the carer-infant microcosm that may well optimize the early linguistic experiences and mitigate later adverse effects for infants born with hearing loss.
... Exaggerated pitch in IDS has been found to play an important role in affect regulation of young infants and in the transmission of maternal emotional and communicative intent to the infant (Fernald, 1992;Kitamura & Burnham, 2003;Song, Demuth, & Morgan, 2010;Spinelli & Mesman, 2018;Stern, Spieker, Barnett, & MacKain, 1983). Furthermore, it has been proposed that exaggerated pitch in IDS aids language acquisition by attracting and maintaining infants' attention to the speech stream (Cooper & Aslin, 1990;Fernald & Simon, 1984). ...
The majority of infants with permanent congenital hearing loss fall significantly behind their normal hearing peers in the development of receptive and expressive oral communication skills. Independent of any prosthetic intervention (“hardware”) for infants with hearing loss, the social and linguistic environment (“software”) can still be optimal or sub-optimal and so can exert significant positive or negative effects on speech and language acquisition, with far-reaching beneficial or adverse effects, respectively. This review focusses on the nature of the social and linguistic environment of infants with hearing loss, in particular others’ speech to infants. The nature of this “infant-directed speech” and its effects on language development has been studied extensively in hearing infants but far less comprehensively in infants with hearing loss. Here, literature on the nature of infant-directed speech and its impact on the speech perception and language acquisition in infants with hearing loss is reviewed. The review brings together evidence on the little-studied effects of infant-directed speech on speech and language development in infants with hearing loss, and provides suggestions, over and above early screening and external treatment, for a natural intervention at the level of the carer-infant microcosm that may well optimize the early linguistic experiences and mitigate later adverse effects for infants born with hearing loss.
... In accordance with previous reports on infants' preference for the positive voice (Singh et al., 2002), we predict that the 3-to 12-month-old infants in this study should listen longer to the happy prosody. Angry and happy voices share similar acoustic profiles (Tato et al., 2002), and young infants tended to confuse the two (Flom & Bahrick, 2007). Therefore, we expected to see an age effect such that the older infants would show more attention to the happy voice than the angry voice, but the younger infants would listen similarly to the two emotions. ...
Purpose
The aim of this study was to investigate infants' listening preference for emotional prosodies in spoken words and identify their acoustic correlates.
Method
Forty-six 3- to-12-month-old infants (M age = 7.6 months) completed a central fixation (or look-to-listen) paradigm in which four emotional prosodies (happy, sad, angry, and neutral) were presented. Infants' looking time to the string of words was recorded as a proxy of their listening attention. Five acoustic variables—mean fundamental frequency (F0), word duration, intensity variation, harmonics-to-noise ratio (HNR), and spectral centroid—were also analyzed to account for infants' attentiveness to each emotion.
Results
Infants generally preferred affective over neutral prosody, with more listening attention to the happy and sad voices. Happy sounds with breathy voice quality (low HNR) and less brightness (low spectral centroid) maintained infants' attention more. Sad speech with shorter word duration (i.e., faster speech rate), less breathiness, and more brightness gained infants' attention more than happy speech did. Infants listened less to angry than to happy and sad prosodies, and none of the acoustic variables were associated with infants' listening interests in angry voices. Neutral words with a lower F0 attracted infants' attention more than those with a higher F0. Neither age nor sex effects were observed.
Conclusions
This study provides evidence for infants' sensitivity to the prosodic patterns for the basic emotion categories in spoken words and how the acoustic properties of emotional speech may guide their attention. The results point to the need to study the interplay between early socioaffective and language development.
... Its design recognizes the existence of four key behavioral biases associated with low parental investment. First, parents' behavior may be influenced by the present bias (Thaler, 2015), which implies attaching low valuation to costly activities that imply rewards only in the future. Another key bias is limited attention and cognitive fatigue as it deviates cognitive resources from important decisions (Shah et al., 2012;Mani et al., 2013;Schilbach et al., 2016) such as those relating to parenting. ...
We assess the effects of the Crianza Positiva text and audio e-messaging program on caregiver–child language interaction patterns. The program is a six-month-long intervention for families with children aged 0–2 aimed at strengthening parental competences. Its design exploits behavioral tools such as reminders, suggestions of action, and messages of encouragement to reinforce and sustain positive parenting practices. Families in 24 early childhood centers in Uruguay that completed an eight-week workshop were randomized into receiving or not receiving mobile messages. After the program, we videotaped 10-minute sessions of free play between the caregiver and the child, and decoded language patterns using automated techniques. The intervention was successful at improving the quality of parental vocalizations, as measured by the parent's pitch range. We also found suggestive evidence of increases in the duration of adult vocalizations. The results are consistent with more frequent parental self-reported involvement in reading, telling stories, and describing things to the child. Regarding the child, we find a nonrobust decrease in the duration of vocalizations, which we attribute to a crowding-out effect by the caregiver in the context of a fixed 10-minute suggested activity and a more proactive parental role.
Power analysis currently dominates sample size determination for experiments, particularly in grant and ethics applications. Yet, this focus could paradoxically result in suboptimal study design because publication biases towards studies with the largest effects can lead to the overestimation of effect sizes. In this Essay, we propose a paradigm shift towards better study designs that focus less on statistical power. We also advocate for (pre)registration and obligatory reporting of all results (regardless of statistical significance), better facilitation of team science and multi-institutional collaboration that incorporates heterogenization, and the use of prospective and living meta-analyses to generate generalizable results. Such changes could make science more effective and, potentially, more equitable, helping to cultivate better collaborations.
