Article

Preference for Infant‐directed Speech in the First Month after Birth

October 1990
Child Development 61(5):1584 - 1595

DOI:10.1111/j.1467-8624.1990.tb02885.x

Authors:

2 experiments examined behavioral preferences for infant-directed (ID) speech over adult-directed (AD) speech in young infants. Using a modification of the visual-fixation-based auditory-preference procedure, Experiments 1 and 2 examined whether 12 1-month-old and 16 2-day-old infants looked longer at a visual stimulus when looking produced ID as opposed to AD speech. The results showed that both 1-month-olds and newborns preferrred ID over AD speech. Although the absolute magnitude of the ID speech preference was significantly greater, with the older infants showing longer looking durations than the younger infants, subsequent analyses showed no significant difference in the relative magnitude of this effect. Differences in overall looking times between the 2 groups apparently reflect task variables rather than differences in speech processing. These results suggest that infants' preference for the exaggerated prosodic features of ID speech is present from birth and may not depend on any specific postnatal experience. However, the possible role of prenatal auditory experience with speech is considered.

Longitudinal study of functional brain networks for processing infant directed and adult directed speech during the first year

Preprint

Full-text available

Jan 2023

In most cultures infant directed speech (IDS) is used to communicate with young children. The main role IDS plays in parent-child interactions appears to change over time from conveying emotion to facilitating language acquisition. There is EEG evidence for the discrimination of IDS form adult directed speech (ADS) at birth, however, less is known about the development of brain networks responsible for differentially processing IDS and ADS. The current study compared topological characteristics of functional brain networks obtained from 49 healthy infants at the age of 0, 6, and 9 months listening to the same fairy tale presented by the same speaker in IDS and ADS speech. Brain connectivity was assessed by the phase lag synchronization index in 6 frequency bands (delta, theta, low alpha, high alpha, beta, gamma). The topology of the large scale network organization was quantified using minimum spanning tree graphs, separately for each band. The delta band cortical network’s organization was found to be significantly more hierarchical and had a more cost-efficient organization during listening to ID compared to listening to AD. This network organization changes with age as nodes over the frontal cortex become more central within the network. The general picture emerging from the results is that with development the speech processing network becomes more integrated and its focus is shifting towards the left hemisphere. Our results suggest that ID speech specific differences in network topology are related to changes in the role of IDS during the first year of life. Highlights - Multiple stages of maturation are reflected by different EEG bands, occurring in parallel, but with different timing. - Networks processing infant directed speech changes during the first year of life reflecting the change in the role infant directed speech plays in development. - Speech processing networks are shifting towards the left hemisphere with age. - Longitudinal study of speech perception using functional networks on a large sample

Language Development in Infants with Hearing Loss: Benefits of Infant-Directed Speech

Preprint

Jan 2022

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.

Language development in infants with hearing loss: Benefits of infant-directed speech

Article

Feb 2022
INFANT BEHAV DEV

Language Development in Infants with Hearing Loss: Benefits of Infant- Directed Speech

Preprint

Full-text available

Jan 2022

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.

Effet des facteurs maternels sur la locomotion quadrupède du nouveau-né

Thesis

Nov 2019

Charlotte Hym

Le début de la locomotion autonome marque une transition majeure dans le développement du nourrisson en lui permettant d'explorer son environnement et de développer de nouveaux couplages perception-action. Cependant la locomotion n'émerge pas pour la première fois vers 8-12 mois avec la marche quadrupède ou bipède. Dès la naissance, le nouveau-né montre déjà plusieurs formes primitives de locomotion autonome. Placé au contact peau à peau sur le ventre de sa mère il est capable de ramper jusqu'au sein maternel et immergé dans l'eau, il se propulse de manière remarquable en réalisant des mouvements coordonnés des bras, du tronc et des jambes ressemblant à ceux de la marche quadrupède mature de nombreux animaux. En utilisant un mini skate sur lequel le nouveau-né est installé sur le ventre et peut effectuer des mouvements libres de ses bras et jambes tout en se propulsant dans toutes les directions, il a été possible d'étudier les caractéristiques de cette locomotion primitive sur le sol. Les résultats montrent que, sur le Crawliskate®, les nouveau-né de deux jours sont capables de se propulser de manière autonome en coordonnant leurs quatre membres avec un pattern diagonal typique de la marche quadrupède mature. La question posée dans cette thèse est d'évaluer la capacité du nouveau-né à adapter cette marche quadrupède à différents facteurs motivationnels. Cette question est fondamentale d'un point de vue théorique et clinique. D'un point de vue fondamental, il est essentiel de connaître quels sont les facteurs susceptibles de contrôler cette locomotion dès la naissance afin d'analyser le niveau de complexité de ce contrôle et jeter les bases des éventuels mécanismes spinaux et/ou supra-spinaux en jeu dans ce contrôle. D'un point de vue clinique, il est crucial d'évaluer les éventuels facteurs susceptibles de stimuler la mobilité quadrupède du nouveau-né, en particulier chez les enfants à risque de développer des anomalies ou des retards de la mobilité précoce et/ou mature. En effet, la capacité des nouveau-nés à répondre par une mobilité appropriée aux stimulations maternelles est essentielle à l'établissement des interactions précoces mère-enfant. Par ailleurs, plusieurs études ont montré que la stimulation précoce de la locomotion primitive du nourrisson permettait un meilleur développement de sa marche mature. Déterminer quels sont les facteurs capables de stimuler la locomotion très précocement est donc un enjeu clinique majeur. A ce jour, très peu d'études se sont intéressées à de tels facteurs et aucune étude n'a analysé leur impact sur les caractéristiques en 2D et 3D de la mobilité quadrupède à la naissance. L'objectif de cette thèse est d'étudier l'effet de différents facteurs maternels sur les caractéristiques de la locomotion quadrupède du nouveau-né placé sur le Crawliskate®. Trois études avec trois stimuli différents ont été effectuées : la première avec la langue maternelle, la seconde avec la voix maternelle et la troisième avec l'odeur maternelle. Les résultats montrent que le nouveau-né est capable d'adapter sa motricité quadrupède en réponse à ces différents facteurs maternels. Le nouveau-né augmente le nombre de ses pas et oriente sa tête vers le haut-parleur lorsqu'il entend du français mais pas de l'anglais. Il différencie la voix de sa propre mère de celle d'une mère étrangère ou d'une condition sans son en effectuant différentes quantités de pas selon la condition. Enfin, l'odeur maternelle augmente l'efficacité de sa propulsion car il effectue moins de mouvements mais parcourt plus de distance en présence de l'odeur maternelle qu'avec une odeur neutre. Ces résultats suggèrent que la mobilité quadrupède du nouveau-né peut être contrôlée par des mécanismes supra-spinaux et ouvre des perspectives nouvelles pour utiliser différents facteurs maternels pour stimuler la mobilité dès la naissance chez les enfants à risque de handicap et/ou privés de stimulations maternelles par une naissance prématurée.

Exploring individual differences in infants’ looking preferences for impossible events: The Early Multidimensional Curiosity Scale

Article

Full-text available

Feb 2023

Infants are drawn to events that violate their expectations about the world: they look longer at physically impossible events, such as when a car passes through a wall. Here, we examined whether individual differences in infants’ visual preferences for physically impossible events reflect an early form of curiosity, and asked whether caregivers’ behaviors, parenting styles, and everyday routines relate to these differences. In Study 1, we presented infants (N = 47, Mage = 16.83 months, range = 10.29–24.59 months) with events that violated physical principles and closely matched possible events. We measured infants’ everyday curiosity and related experiences (i.e., caregiver curiosity-promoting activities) through a newly developed curiosity scale, The Early Multidimensional Curiosity Scale (EMCS). Infants’ looking preferences for physically impossible events were positively associated with their score on the EMCS, but not their temperament, vocabulary, or caregiver trait curiosity. In Study 2A, we set out to better understand the relation between the EMCS and infants’ looking preferences for physically impossible events by assessing the underlying structure of the EMCS with a larger sample of children (N = 211, Mage = 47.63 months, range = 10.29–78.97 months). An exploratory factor analysis revealed that children’s curiosity was comprised four factors: Social Curiosity, Broad Exploration, Persistence, and Information-Seeking. Relatedly, caregiver curiosity-promoting activities were composed of five factors: Flexible Problem-Solving, Cognitive Stimulation, Diverse Daily Activities, Child-Directed Play, and Awe-Inducing Activities. In Study 2B (N = 42 infants from Study 1), we examined which aspects of infant curiosity and caregiver behavior predicted infants’ looking preferences using the factor structures of the EMCS. Findings revealed that infants’ looking preferences were uniquely related to infants’ Broad Exploration and caregivers’ Awe-Inducing Activities (e.g., nature walks with infants, museum outings). These exploratory findings indicate that infants’ visual preferences for physically impossible events may reflect an early form of curiosity, which is related to the curiosity-stimulating environments provided by caregivers. Moreover, this work offers a new comprehensive tool, the Early Multidimensional Curiosity Scale, that can be used to measure both curiosity and factors related to its development, starting in infancy and extending into childhood.

Mothers adapt their voice during children’s adolescent development

Article

Full-text available

Jan 2022

Mothers alter their speech in a stereotypical manner when addressing infants using high pitch, a wide pitch range, and distinct timbral features. Mothers reduce their vocal pitch after early childhood; however, it is not known whether mother’s voice changes through adolescence as children become increasingly independent from their parents. Here we investigate the vocal acoustics of 50 mothers of older children (ages 7–16) to determine: (1) whether pitch changes associated with child-directed speech decrease with age; (2) whether other acoustical features associated with child-directed speech change with age; and, (3) the relative contribution of acoustical features in predicting child’s age. Results reveal that mothers of older children used lower pitched voices than mothers of younger children, and mother’s voice pitch height predicted their child’s age. Crucially, these effects were present after controlling for mother’s age, accounting for aging-related pitch reductions. Brightness, a timbral feature correlated with pitch height, also showed an inverse relation with child’s age but did not improve prediction of child’s age beyond that accounted for by pitch height. Other acoustic features did not predict child age. Findings suggest that mother’s voice adapts to match their child’s developmental progression into adolescence and this adaptation is independent of mother’s age.

Sprachwahrnehmung im Säuglingsalter

Article

Full-text available

Jul 2023

Nicole Altvater‐Mackensen

Zusammenfassung: Der Artikel gibt einen Überblick über die Entwicklung der Sprachwahrnehmung im ersten Lebensjahr. Er zeichnet den Entwicklungsverlauf von den frühesten Hörerfahrungen bis zum ersten gesprochenen Wort nach und geht darauf ein: (i) wie vorgeburtliche Erfahrungen das Hören bei Neugeborenen prägen; (ii) wie die Sprachwahrnehmung sich im Säuglingsalter verändert und auf die Umgebungssprache einstellt; (iii) welche Faktoren die Veränderung in der Sprachwahrnehmung beeinflussen; (iv) wie theoretische Modelle diese Veränderungen erklären; und (v) welche Rolle die perzeptuelle Entwicklung im ersten Lebensjahr für die weitere Sprachentwicklung spielt.

Acoustic cues to phrase and clause boundaries in infant-directed speech: Evidence from LENA recordings

Article

Full-text available

Jun 2023
J CHILD LANG

Infant-directed speech (IDS) produced in laboratory settings contains acoustic cues, such as pauses, pitch changes, and vowel-lengthening that could facilitate breaking speech into smaller units, such as syntactically well-formed utterances, and the noun- and verb-phrases within them. It is unclear whether these cues are present in speech produced in more natural contexts outside the lab. We captured LENA recordings of caregiver speech to 12-month-old infants in daylong interactions (N = 49) to address this question. We found that the final positions of syntactically well-formed utterances contained greater vowel lengthening and pitch changes, and were followed by longer pauses, relative to non-final positions. However, we found no evidence that these cues were present at utterance-internal phrase boundaries. Results suggest that acoustic cues marking the boundaries of well-formed utterances are salient in everyday speech to infants and highlight the importance of characterizing IDS in a large sample of naturally-produced speech to infants.

Implication of the Contribution of Prosody in Language Acquisition for Chomskyan Nativism

Article

Full-text available

Jan 2022

The detailed review of the literature related to language acquisition undertaken in the present article reveals that Chomskyans accord very little attention to the possible role that infant/children’s environment may be playing in the realization of specific linguistic behavior. Nor do they seem to appreciate implications of the fact that the brain is fundamentally very different from all other organs of the body as changes in brain’s structural, functional, and representational properties are significantly modulated by its engaged environment and plasticity. This oversight seems to be responsible for, at least to some extent, their inability to appreciate the fact that the effects of biological endowment on cognitive capacities including linguistic abilities are mediated through experience. In light of the empirical data discussed here, the Chomskyan claim that language acquisition does not depend on learning and basically requires triggering of certain languagespecific mechanisms, appears quite problematic. Furthermore, the review of extensive research on the role of prosody in language acquisition as well as the changing nature of the significance of different cues with time further highlights the facilitative nature of such aspects in language acquisition. Consideration of all these facts tends to considerably strengthen the neuroconstructivist account as a more plausible and satisfactory approach for understanding the process of language acquisition than Chomskyan nativism.

Infant-directed speech facilitates word learning through attentional mechanisms: An fNIRS study of toddlers

Article

Full-text available

Jun 2023
DEVELOPMENTAL SCI

The speech register that adults especially caregivers use when interacting with infants and toddlers, that is, infant‐directed speech (IDS) or baby talk, has been reported to facilitate language development throughout the early years. However, the neural mechanisms as well as why IDS results in such a developmental faciliatory effect remain to be investigated. The current study uses functional near‐infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) to evaluate two alternative hypotheses of such a facilitative effect, that IDS serves to enhance linguistic contrastiveness or to attract the child's attention. Behavioral and fNIRS data were acquired from twenty‐seven Cantonese‐learning toddlers 15–20 months of age when their parents spoke to them in either an IDS or adult‐directed speech (ADS) register in a naturalistic task in which the child learned four disyllabic pseudowords. fNIRS results showed significantly greater neural responses to IDS than ADS register in the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (L‐dlPFC), but opposite response patterns in the bilateral inferior frontal gyrus (IFG). The differences in fNIRS responses to IDS and to ADS in the L‐dlPFC and the left parietal cortex (L‐PC) showed significantly positive correlations with the differences in the behavioral word‐learning performance of toddlers. The same fNIRS measures in the L‐dlPFC and right PC (R‐PC) of toddlers were significantly correlated with pitch range differences of parents between the two speech conditions. Together, our results suggest that the dynamic prosody in IDS increased toddlers’ attention through greater involvement of the left frontoparietal network that facilitated word learning, compared to ADS. Research Highlights This study for the first time examined the neural mechanisms of how infant‐directed speech (IDS) facilitates word learning in toddlers. Using fNIRS, we identified the cortical regions that were directly involved in IDS processing. Our results suggest that IDS facilitates word learning by engaging a right‐lateralized prosody processing and top‐down attentional mechanisms in the left frontoparietal networks. The language network including the inferior frontal gyrus and temporal cortex was not directly involved in IDS processing to support word learning.

Two-part vowel modifications in Child Directed Speech in Warlpiri may enhance child attention to speech and scaffold noun acquisition

Article

Full-text available

Jun 2023
PHONETICA

Study 1 compared vowels in Child Directed Speech (CDS; child ages 25-46 months) to vowels in Adult Directed Speech (ADS) in natural conversation in the Australian Indigenous language Warlpiri, which has three vowels (/i/, /a/, /u). Study 2 compared the vowels of the child interlocutors from Study 1 to caregiver ADS and CDS. Study 1 indicates that Warlpiri CDS vowels are characterised by fronting, /a/-lowering, f o -raising, and increased duration, but not vowel space expansion. Vowels in CDS nouns, however, show increased between-contrast differentiation and reduced within-contrast variation, similar to what has been reported for other languages. We argue that this two-part CDS modification process serves a dual purpose: Vowel space shifting induces IDS/CDS that sounds more child-like, which may enhance child attention to speech, while increased between-contrast differentiation and reduced within-contrast variation in nouns may serve didactic purposes by providing high-quality information about lexical specifications. Study 2 indicates that Warlpiri CDS vowels are more like child vowels, providing indirect evidence that aspects of CDS may serve non-linguistic purposes simultaneously with other aspects serving linguistic-didactic purposes. The studies have novel implications for the way CDS vowel modifications are considered and highlight the necessity of naturalistic data collection, novel analyses, and typological diversity.

Developmental Psychology

Chapter

Dec 2022

Prosódia e funções discursivas das interrogativas na Fala Dirigida à Criança (Prosody and discursive functions of questions in Infant-Directed Speech)

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Dec 2022

Investigamos as interrogativas produzidas com fala dirigida à criança por adultos interagindo com bebês brasileiros. A FDC apresenta modificações sintáticas, lexicais, prosódicas e alta taxa de interrogativas. Coletamos dados de quatro bebês (4 a 12 meses) e seus cuidadores e caracterizamos as perguntas em seus aspectos prosódicos e funções discursivas. Verificamos que a maioria das perguntas foi marcada por um ou mais traços prosódicos. Inicialmente as perguntas buscam engajar o bebê na cena, são retóricas e bastante realçadas. Aos seis meses, cresce a presença de semirretóricas, que visam verificar a compreensão. Aos dez meses, perguntas plenas, buscando informação nova e resposta clara, tornam-se mais presentes. Os resultados sugerem que as funções das interrogativas alinham-se ao desenvolvimento da capacidade do bebê de dialogar com o adulto, tendo a prosódia importante papel ao destacar distinções entre enunciados e intenções do adulto, potencializando o desenvolvimento cognitivo, linguístico, afetivo e social do bebê.

The F0 fall delay of lexical pitch accent in Japanese infant-directed speech

Conference Paper

Sep 2012

Music in early childhood education: its importance in child development and classroom interaction

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Sep 2022

Tumaini Samweli Mugaya

Screen Media Exposure in Early Childhood and Its Relation to Children’s Self-Regulation

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Full-text available

Nov 2022

Self-regulation, the ability to control thoughts, emotions, and behavior for goal-directed activities, shows rapid development in infancy, toddlerhood, and preschool periods. Early self-regulatory skills predict later academic achievement and socioemotional adjustment. An increasing number of studies suggest that screen media use may have negative effects on children's developing self-regulatory skills. In this systematic review, we summarized and integrated the findings of the studies investigating the relationship between young children's screen media use and their self-regulation. We searched the ERIC, PsycINFO, PubMed, and Web of Science databases and identified 39 relevant articles with 45 studies. We found that screen time in infancy is negatively associated with self-regulation, but findings were more inconsistent for later ages suggesting that screen time does not adequately capture the extent of children's screen media use. The findings further indicated that background TV is negatively related to children's self-regulation, and watching fantastical content seems to have immediate negative effects on children's self-regulatory skills. We suggest that future studies should take the content and context of children's screen media use into account and also focus on parent-and home-related factors such as parental behaviors that foster the development of self-regulatory skills.

Parentalidad, apego y desarrollo infantil

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Jan 2022

Karina Sandoval

Las experiencias del niño con sus padres juegan un papel clave en el desarrollo infantil. El cuidado parental promueve el desarrollo cognitivo, emocional y social; en contraste, la parentalidad basada en el rechazo, el maltrato y la negligencia está asociada a problemas psicológicos y de comportamiento, así como a dificultades en los futuros procesos de parentalidad. Este artículo tiene el objetivo de informar acerca de algunos de los mecanismos psicológicos y neurobiológicos que incrementan el riesgo de transmisión intergeneracional de la adversidad temprana. Asimismo, se describen algunas intervenciones concretas para el desarrollo del potencial infantil.

A Systematic Review and Bayesian Meta-Analysis of the Acoustic Features of Infant-Directed Speech

Article

Full-text available

Oct 2022
Nat. Hum. Behav.

When speaking to infants, adults often produce speech that differs systematically from that directed to other adults. To quantify the acoustic properties of this speech style across a wide variety of languages and cultures, we extracted results from empirical studies on the acoustic features of infant-directed speech. We analysed data from 88 unique studies (734 effect sizes) on the following five acoustic parameters that have been systematically examined in the literature: fundamental frequency (f0), f0 variability, vowel space area, articulation rate and vowel duration. Moderator analyses were conducted in hierarchical Bayesian robust regression models to examine how these features change with infant age and differ across languages, experimental tasks and recording environments. The moderator analyses indicated that f0, articulation rate and vowel duration became more similar to adult-directed speech over time, whereas f0 variability and vowel space area exhibited stability throughout development. These results point the way for future research to disentangle different accounts of the functions and learnability of infant-directed speech by conducting theory-driven comparisons among different languages and using computational models to formulate testable predictions.

Entwicklung pragmatischer Fähigkeiten -Sprachgebrauch vor den ersten Wörtern

Article

Full-text available

Sep 2022

Daniela Buehler

Tagtäglich führen wir Gespräche und tauschen uns aus. Dabei ist den wenigstens von uns bewusst, wie viel Wissen und Fähigkeiten wir für eine gelingende Kommunikation brauchen. Es braucht einen Einstieg in ein Gespräch, dieses muss dann über mehrere Sprecherwechsel aufrechterhalten werden. Kommt es zu Missver-ständnissen, so muss flexibel reagiert und korrigiert werden, dazu ist es auch wichtig, das Wissen und den aktuellen Informationsstand des Gegenübers miteinzubeziehen. Wie entwickeln sich diese Fähigkeiten und wie gelingt es uns, zu kompetenten Gesprächspartnern zu werden? Kinder zeigen eine grosse Motivation zu kom-munizieren und zeigen bereits in den ersten Lebensmonaten Entwicklungsschritte in Richtung kompetenter Kommunikationspartner, wobei sich die früh gelegten Grundsteine stetig weiterentwickeln. In diesem Fachartikel werden Ergebnisse aus verschiedenen Studien zusammengefasst, um ein möglichst ganzheitliches Bild der pragmatisch-kommunikativen Entwicklung in den ersten Lebensmonaten zu entwerfen. Dabei liegt der Fokus auf der dyadischen Interaktion zwischen dem Säugling und seinen Bezugspersonen sowie auf der ersten Zeit der triadischen Interaktion, in der die Kinder noch keine Worte erworben haben. Auch wird dargestellt, was für Fähigkeiten das Kind im ersten Lebensjahr entwickeln sollte, und wie seine Umwelt darauf reagieren kann, damit ein gemeinsamer Austausch möglich ist. We have conversations and exchange ideas every day without being aware of how much knowledge and skills we need for a successful communication. It needs an introduction of a topic which must then be maintained over several speaker changes. If misunderstandings occur, it is necessary to repair. It is also important to include the knowledge and the current state of information of the other person. How do these skills develop and how do we succeed in becoming competent interlocutors? Children display a great motivation to communicate and already show developmental steps towards competent communication partners in the first months of life, whereby the foundations laid early on are constantly evolving. In this article, results from various studies are summarized to create an overview of pragmatic-communicative development in the first months of life. In doing so, The focus lies on the dyadic interaction between the infant and his caregivers as well as on the first period of triadic interaction, in which the children have not yet acquired words. This summary is an attempt to show what skills the child should develop in the first year of life, and how his environment can react to them so that a common exchange is possible.

Infant selective attention to native and non-native audiovisual speech

Article

Full-text available

Sep 2022

The current study utilized eye-tracking to investigate the effects of intersensory redundancy and language on infant visual attention and detection of a change in prosody in audiovisual speech. Twelve-month-old monolingual English-learning infants viewed either synchronous (redundant) or asynchronous (non-redundant) presentations of a woman speaking in native or non-native speech. Halfway through each trial, the speaker changed prosody from infant-directed speech (IDS) to adult-directed speech (ADS) or vice versa. Infants focused more on the mouth of the speaker on IDS trials compared to ADS trials regardless of language or intersensory redundancy. Additionally, infants demonstrated greater detection of prosody changes from IDS speech to ADS speech in native speech. Planned comparisons indicated that infants detected prosody changes across a broader range of conditions during redundant stimulus presentations. These findings shed light on the influence of language and prosody on infant attention and highlight the complexity of audiovisual speech processing in infancy.

Infant selective attention to native and non-native audiovisual speech

Article

Full-text available

Sep 2022

Pitch Perception in a Developing Auditory Brain

Article

Jan 2022

Bonnie K Lau

Effects of Segmental and Suprasegmental Speech Perception on Reading in Pediatric Cochlear Implant Recipients

Article

Aug 2022

Purpose The aim of this study was to determine whether suprasegmental speech perception contributes unique variance in predictions of reading decoding and comprehension for prelingually deaf children using two devices, at least one of which is a cochlear implant (CI). Method A total of 104, 5- to 9-year-old CI recipients completed tests of segmental perception (e.g., word recognition in quiet and noise, recognition of vowels and consonants in quiet), suprasegmental perception (e.g., talker and stress discrimination, nonword stress repetition, and emotion identification), and nonverbal intelligence. Two years later, participants completed standardized tests of reading decoding and comprehension. Using regression analyses, the unique contribution of suprasegmental perception to reading skills was determined after controlling for demographic characteristics and segmental perception performance. Results Standardized reading scores of the CI recipients increased with nonverbal intelligence for both decoding and comprehension. Female gender was associated with higher comprehension scores. After controlling for gender and nonverbal intelligence, segmental perception accounted for approximately 4% and 2% of the variance in decoding and comprehension, respectively. After controlling for nonverbal intelligence, gender, and segmental perception, suprasegmental perception accounted for an extra 4% and 7% unique variance in reading decoding and reading comprehension, respectively. Conclusions Suprasegmental perception operates independently from segmental perception to facilitate good reading outcomes for these children with CIs. Clinicians and educators should be mindful that early perceptual skills may have long-term benefits for literacy. Research on how to optimize suprasegmental perception, perhaps through hearing-device programming and/or training strategies, is needed.

Lessons from infant learning for unsupervised machine learning

Article

Jun 2022

The desire to reduce the dependence on curated, labeled datasets and to leverage the vast quantities of unlabeled data has triggered renewed interest in unsupervised (or self-supervised) learning algorithms. Despite improved performance due to approaches such as the identification of disentangled latent representations, contrastive learning and clustering optimizations, unsupervised machine learning still falls short of its hypothesized potential as a breakthrough paradigm enabling generally intelligent systems. Inspiration from cognitive (neuro)science has been based mostly on adult learners with access to labels and a vast amount of prior knowledge. To push unsupervised machine learning forward, we argue that developmental science of infant cognition might hold the key to unlocking the next generation of unsupervised learning approaches. We identify three crucial factors enabling infants’ quality and speed of learning: (1) babies’ information processing is guided and constrained; (2) babies are learning from diverse, multimodal inputs; and (3) babies’ input is shaped by development and active learning. We assess the extent to which these insights from infant learning have already been exploited in machine learning, examine how closely these implementations resemble the core insights, and propose how further adoption of these factors can give rise to previously unseen performance levels in unsupervised learning. Unsupervised machine learning algorithms reduce the dependence on curated, labeled datasets that are characteristic of supervised machine learning. The authors argue that the developmental science of infant cognition could inform the design of unsupervised machine learning approaches.

Oxytocin but not naturally occurring variation in caregiver touch associates with infant social orienting

Article

Full-text available

Jun 2022
DEV PSYCHOBIOL

Caregiver touch is crucial for infants' healthy development, but its role in shaping infant cognition has been relatively understudied. In particular, despite strong premises to hypothesize its function in directing infant attention to social information, little empirical evidence exists on the topic. In this study, we investigated the associations between naturally occurring variation in caregiver touch and infant social attention in a group of 6-to 13-month-old infants (n = 71). Additionally, we measured infant salivary oxytocin as a possible mediator of the effects of touch on infant social attention. The hypothesized effects were investigated both short term, with respect to touch observed during parent-infant interactions in the lab, and long term, with respect to parent-reported patterns of everyday touching behaviors. We did not find evidence that caregiver touch predicts infant social attention or salivary oxytocin levels, short term or long term. However, we found that salivary oxytocin predicted infant preferential attention to faces relative to nonsocial objects, measured in an eye-tracking task. Our findings confirm the involvement of oxytocin in social orienting in infancy, but raise questions regarding the possible environmental factors influencing the infant oxytocin system.

Spanish-learning infants switch from a vowel to a consonant bias during the first year of life

Article

Sep 2022
J EXP CHILD PSYCHOL

The consonant bias is evidenced by a greater reliance on consonants over vowels in lexical processing. Although attested during adulthood for most Roman and Germanic languages (e.g., French, Italian, English, Dutch), evidence on its development suggests that the native input modulates its trajectory. French and Italian learners exhibit an early switch from a higher reliance on vowels at 5 and 6 months of age to a consonant bias by the end of the first year. This study investigated the developmental trajectory of this bias in a third Romance language unexplored so far—Spanish. In a central visual fixation procedure, infants aged 5, 8½, and 12 months were tested in a word recognition task. In Experiment 1, infants preferred listening to frequent words (e.g., leche, milk) over nonwords (e.g., machi) at all ages. Experiment 2 assessed infants’ listening times to consonant and vowel alterations of the words used in Experiment 1. Here, 5-month-olds preferred listening to consonant alterations, whereas 12-month-olds preferred listening to vowel alterations, suggesting that 5-month-olds’ recognition performance was more affected by a vowel alteration (e.g., leche →lache), whereas 12-month-olds’ recognition performance was more affected by a consonant alteration (e.g., leche →keche). These findings replicate previous findings in Italian and French and generalize them to a third Romance language (Spanish). As such, they support the idea that specific factors common to Romance languages might be driving an early consonant bias in lexical processing.

Vocabulary and Executive Functioning: A Scoping Review of the Unidirectional and Bidirectional Associations Across Early Childhood

Article

May 2022

Early childhood marks a time where word learning is accompanied by rapid growth in the cognitive processes that underlie self-modulated and goal-directed behavior (i.e., executive functions). Although there is empirical evidence to support the association between executive functioning and vocabulary in childhood, inconsistent findings have been reported regarding the extent to which early executive functioning abilities predict later vocabulary outcomes and vice versa. To clarify the nature of the longitudinal relation between these two processes and to examine what, if any, claims can be made about their interdependence, a critical review of the literature was conducted. Also addressed are the conceptual and/or methodological differences that exist across studies conducted on this topic that may be contributing to some of the discrepancies reported in the longitudinal literature. Finally, this review provides practical and empirically-informed future directions to serve as a resource for early childhood researchers advancing this area of study.

Communicative efficiency in multimodal language

Preprint

Apr 2022

The ecology of communication is face-to-face. In these contexts, speakers dynamically modify their communication across vocal (e.g., speaking rate) and gestural (e.g., co-speech gestures related in meaning to the content of speech) channels while speaking. What is the function of these adjustments? Here we test the hypothesis that speakers produced these multimodal adjustments to the service of communicative efficiency, to reduce cognitive effort and maximise likelihood of successful communication. While this hypothesis is not new, here we test whether it applies across vocal and gestural channels and across child and adult comprehenders. We assess whether speakers modulate word durations and produce gestures depending on the predictability (surprisal) of the words. Surprisal was computed from computational language models trained on corpora of Child-Directed, or Adult-Directed Language. We found that surprisal predicted speakers’ multimodal adjustments in a new corpus of naturalistic interactions between adult-child (aged 3-4), and adult-adult. The effects were modulated by whether the comprehender was a child or an adult. Thus, communicative efficiency applies generally to multimodal language use not being limited to structural properties of language or vocal modality.

Looking Through a Crystal. Ball: Impact of iron status on Cognitive Functions in Egyptian Children

Article

Apr 2022

Objective: Determine the effect of iron deficiency anemia (IDA) & iron deficiency (ID), on the cognitive functions in children and its consequences. Patients and Methods: Three groups of children were enrolled in this case-control study with an age range of 3-8 years. They were selected from pediatric and phoniatric clinics in Egypt. Control group (CG): thirty normal children. Case groups were divided into GroupI: Nineteen Delayed language development children had ID only, Group II: Thirty Delayed language development children had iron deficiency anemia (IDA). Groups were subjected to (1) Full history taking (focusing on nutritional history). (2) CBC by automatic cell counters. (3) Iron status through estimation of serum ferritin level by ELISA. (4) Assessment of cognitive functions by assessment of Non-verbal Intelligent Quotient (NV-IQ) using Stanford Binet 5 th Edition measuring (fluid reasoning, knowledge, quantitative reasoning, visual-spatial processing, and working memory). (5) Assessment of language-by-language test to confirm diagnosis of delayed language development. Results: Under the umbrella of faulty eating habits, there was a direct correlation between the NV-IQ and the deterioration of iron status with their consequence on delaying language development. Conclusion: There is a necessary to assess NV-IQ and iron status in any child with delayed language development with poor attention span, intelligence, sensory perception functions, emotions, and behavior, especially with the condition of faulty eating habits.

Structures of Function Words Guide Mandarin-Learning 19- Month-Olds in Backward Syntactic Categorization

Conference Paper

Full-text available

Jan 2021

Syntactic categorization with medial function words

Toddlers use functional morphemes for backward syntactic categorization

Article

Full-text available

Mar 2022

Previous studies show that infants store functional morphemes for inferring syntactic categories of adjacent words, and they generally perform better with nouns than with verbs. In this study, we tested whether toddlers can exploit phrasal groupings for syntactic categorization in the face of noisy co-occurrence patterns. Using a visual fixation procedure, we examined whether Mandarin-learning 19-month-olds can categorize word X to the left of functional morpheme a in a prosody-neutral 3-word sequence X- a-Y, where a structurally selects X (X and Y being unfamiliar words). Infants at 19 months were familiarized either with X- ye-Y (‘even X N Y V ’) or with X- le-Y (‘have X V -ed Y N ’). While le features a more mixed distribution than ye, 19-month-olds succeeded with both ye and le by preferring grammatical new contexts of X over ungrammatical ones, consistent with the hypothesis that phrasal groupings ([X a. . .]) support syntactic categorization. Our findings provide initial evidence for infants’ ability to capture functional morphemes for backward syntactic categorization.

The Lemma Dilemma: Finding relevant lemmas to include in the Communicative Development Inventory for Sign Language of the Netherlands (NGT-CDI)

Thesis

Full-text available

Jun 2021

Anique Schüller

Vocabulary size is a critical marker for language development. It serves as a predictor for future language development in spoken and/or sign languages. Given the relative lack of assessment instruments for sign language development in deaf children living in The Neherlands, we propose a lemma list for a future Communicative Development Inventory (CDI; Fenson et al., 1994) for Sign Language of the Netherlands (NGT): the NGT-CDI. When compiling this list of NGT lemmas, we compared the lemma lists of six sign languages (i.e., ASL-CDI, Anderson & Reilly, 2002; SLN-CDI, Hoiting, 2009; BSL-CDI, Woolfe et al., 2010; LSE-CDI, Rodriguez-Ortiz et al., 2019; ISL-CDI, Novogrodzky & Meir, 2020; DGS-CDI, Hennies et al., unpublished manuscript) and two spoken languages (MB-CDI, Fenson et al., 1994; N-CDI, Zink & Lejaegere, 2002). After a selection procedure, a proto list was compiled. A pilot study was conducted to test whether the proto list was suitable for our intended target groups: young deaf children of deaf parents (DCDP) and deaf children of hearing parents (DCHP) between 8-36 months old. It is expected that DCHP, who are born in a hearing environment, will receive atypical sign language input because NGT is not the native language of their parents. In the pilot study, two DCDP and one DCHP were involved. In general, we can conclude that the results show that the NGT lemma list is suitable for both target groups. This outcome is promising for the development of a future NGT-CDI that can be widely used. Keywords: Sign language; early vocabulary development; assessment; deaf; CDI

A Systematic Review and Bayesian Meta-Analysis of the Acoustic Features of Infant-Directed Speech

Preprint

Full-text available

Feb 2022

When speaking to infants, adults often produce speech that differs systematically from that directed to other adults. In order to quantify the acoustic implementation of this speech style across a wide variety of languages and cultures, we extracted results from empirical studies on the acoustic features of infant-directed speech (IDS). We analyzed data from 87 unique studies (669 effect sizes) on the following five acoustic parameters that have been systematically examined in the literature: i) fundamental frequency ( f o ), ii) f o variability, iii) vowel space area, iv) articulation rate, and v) vowel duration. Moderator analyses were conducted in hierarchical Bayesian robust regression models in order to examine how these features change with infant age and differ across languages, experimental tasks and recording environments. The moderator analyses indicated that f o , articulation rate, and vowel duration became more similar to adult-directed speech (ADS) over time, whereas f o variability and vowel space area exhibited stability throughout development. These results point the way for future research to disentangle different accounts of the functions and learnability of IDS by conducting theory-driven comparisons among different languages and using computational models to formulate testable predictions.

Natural Infant-Directed Speech Facilitates Neural Tracking of Prosody

Article

Full-text available

Feb 2022
NEUROIMAGE

Infants prefer to be addressed with infant-directed speech (IDS). IDS benefits language acquisition through amplified low-frequency amplitude modulations. It has been reported that this amplification increases electrophysiological tracking of IDS compared to adult-directed speech (ADS). It is still unknown which particular frequency band triggers this effect. Here, we compare tracking at the rates of syllables and prosodic stress, which are both critical to word segmentation and recognition. In mother-infant dyads (n=30), mothers described novel objects to their 9-month-olds while infants’ EEG was recorded. For IDS, mothers were instructed to speak to their children as they typically do, while for ADS, mothers described the objects as if speaking with an adult. Phonetic analyses confirmed that pitch features were more prototypically infant-directed in the IDS-condition compared to the ADS-condition. Neural tracking of speech was assessed by speech-brain coherence, which measures the synchronization between speech envelope and EEG. Results revealed significant speech-brain coherence at both syllabic and prosodic stress rates, indicating that infants track speech in IDS and ADS at both rates. We found significantly higher speech-brain coherence for IDS compared to ADS in the prosodic stress rate but not the syllabic rate. This indicates that the IDS benefit arises primarily from enhanced prosodic stress. Thus, neural tracking is sensitive to parents’ speech adaptations during natural interactions, possibly facilitating higher-level inferential processes such as word segmentation from continuous speech.

Dog brains are sensitive to infant- and dog-directed prosody

Article

Full-text available

Aug 2023

When addressing preverbal infants and family dogs, people tend to use specific speech styles. While recent studies suggest acoustic parallels between infant- and dog-directed speech, it is unclear whether dogs, like infants, show enhanced neural sensitivity to prosodic aspects of speech directed to them. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging on awake unrestrained dogs we identify two non-primary auditory regions, one that involve the ventralmost part of the left caudal Sylvian gyrus and the temporal pole and the other at the transition of the left caudal and rostral Sylvian gyrus, which respond more to naturalistic dog- and/or infant-directed speech than to adult-directed speech, especially when speak by female speakers. This activity increase is driven by sensitivity to fundamental frequency mean and variance resulting in positive modulatory effects of these acoustic parameters in both aforementioned non-primary auditory regions. These findings show that the dog auditory cortex, similarly to that of human infants, is sensitive to the acoustic properties of speech directed to non-speaking partners. This increased neuronal responsiveness to exaggerated prosody may be one reason why dogs outperform other animals when processing speech.

EXPRESS: Child Word Learning in Song and Speech

Article

Apr 2023

Listening to sung words rather than spoken words can facilitate word learning and memory in adults and school-aged children. To explore the development of this effect in young children, this study examined word learning (assessed as forming word-object associations) in 1-2-year-olds and 3-4-year-olds, and word long term memory (LTM) in 4-5-year-olds several days after the initial learning. In an intermodal preferential looking paradigm, children were taught a pair of words utilizing adult-directed speech (ADS) and a pair of sung words. Word learning performance was better with sung words than with ADS words in 1-2-year-olds (Experiments 1a, 1b), 3-4-year-olds (Experiment 1a), and 4-5-year-olds (Experiment 2b), revealing a benefit of song in word learning in all age ranges recruited. We also examined whether children successfully learned the words by comparing their performance against chance. The 1-2-year-olds only learned sung words, but the 3-4-year-olds learned both sung and ADS words, suggesting that the reliance on music features in word learning observed at ages 1-2 decreased with age. Furthermore, song facilitated the word mapping-recognition processes. Results on children's LTM performance showed that the 4-5-year-olds' LTM performance did not differ between sung and ADS words. However, the 4-5-year-olds reliably recalled sung words but not spoken words. The reliable LTM of sung words arose from hearing sung words during the initial learning rather than at test. Finally, the benefit of song on word learning and the reliable LTM of sung words observed at ages 3-5 cannot be explained as an attentional effect.

Developmental Psychology

Chapter

Oct 2022

Developmental Psychology

Chapter

May 2022

Reading Picture Books with Infants and Toddlers: Learning Through Language

Book

Jan 2023

Jane Torr

Statistical word segmentation: Anchoring learning across contexts

Article

Dec 2022

The present experiments were designed to assess infants' abilities to use syllable co‐occurrence regularities to segment fluent speech across contexts. Specifically, we investigated whether 9‐month‐old infants could use statistical regularities in one speech context to support speech segmentation in a second context. Contexts were defined by different word sets representing contextual differences that might occur across conversations or utterances. This mimics the integration of information across multiple interactions within a single language, which is critical for language acquisition. In particular, we performed two experiments to assess whether a statistically segmented word could be used to anchor segmentation in a second, more challenging context, namely speech with variable word lengths. The results of Experiment 1 were consistent with past work suggesting that statistical learning may be hindered by speech with word‐length variability, which is inherent to infants' natural speech environments. In Experiment 2, we found that infants could use a previously statistically segmented word to support word segmentation in a novel, challenging context. We also present findings suggesting that this ability was associated with infants' early word knowledge but not their performance on a cognitive development assessment.

Figyelem a gyakorlatban

Book

Dec 2022

A figyelem az életünk meghatározó része, a legapróbb cselekedeteinket is átszövi kora gyermekkortól egészen az időskorig. Mindenki tud példát mondani arra, amikor figyelt, amikor valamire direkt nem figyelt, amikor észrevett valami változást, amit mások nem, amikor elfáradt és nem tudott tovább figyelni, és arra is, amikor felfrissült és újra oda tudott figyelni. Persze ebben nagyok az egyéni különbségek, hiszen arra, hogy mire, mennyire és hogyan figyelünk, hat az, hogy milyen természetűek vagyunk. Az viszont mindenkire igaz, hogy figyelem nélkül sok szórakoztató tevékenységet nem tudnánk gyakorolni. A figyelmi képességünk alapvető, elválaszthatatlan része a kommunikációnak, a digitális eszközhasználatnak, a sportnak és a művészetnek. Ugyanakkor a figyelmi képességeink alapvetőségének akkor kerülünk igazán tudatába, amikor valamelyik „része” hiányzik. A figyelmi deficitek széles körben megjelennek a neuropszichológiától a különböző függőségeken át a figyelemhiányos hiperaktivitás-zavarig. Jelen kötet célja közérthetően bemutatni a figyelem (kognitív) pszichológiájának sokszínűségét és egyes aspektusainak gyakorlati relevanciáját olyan alkalmazott szemlélettel, amely érthető az érdeklődő laikusoknak és hasznára lehet számos diszciplínában tanuló (jövőbeli) szakembernek.

Riding the elephant in the room: Towards a revival of the optimal level of stimulation model

Article

Full-text available

Dec 2022
DEV REV

Phenomena such as engagement, attention and curiosity rely heavily on the “optimal-level of stimulation (or arousal)” model, which suggests they are driven by stimuli being neither too simple nor too complex. Two points often overlooked in psychology are that each stimulus is simultaneously processed with its context, and that a stimulus complexity is relative to an individual’s cognitive resources to process it. According to the “optimal-level of stimulation” model, while familiar contexts may decrease the overall stimulation and favour exploration of novelty, a novel context may increase the overall stimulation and favour preference for familiarity. In order to stay closer to their optimum when stimulation is getting too high or too low, individuals can explore other stimuli, adopt a different processing style or be creative. The need and the ability to adopt such strategies will depend upon the cognitive resources available, which can be affected by contextual stimulation and by other factors such as age, mood or arousability. Drawing on empirical research in cognitive and developmental psychology, we provide here an updated “optimal-level of stimulation” model, which is holistic and coherent with previous literature. Once taken into account the role of contextual stimulation as well as the diverse factors influencing internal cognitive resources, such model fits with and enriches other existing theories related to exploratory behaviors. By doing so, it provides a useful framework to investigate proximate explanations underlying learning and cognitive development, and to develop future interventions related, for example, to eating, and learning disorders.

From Sound Discrimination to Sound Identification: The Importance of Child-Directed Speech and Interactional Cues During Language Acquisition

Chapter

Oct 2022

Christelle Dodane

For a baby, an essential prerequisite for building the syntactic knowledge of their mother tongue is to segment this speech flow into constituents. Indeed, the speech flow is continuous but the language is discrete. In this context, one issue is related to the huge intraindividual and interindividual variability present in the speech signal. So, how can babies break the linguistic code? How can they manage to extract invariant representations of the sounds of their mother tongue and to associate a meaning with those sequences of sounds from the continuous speech flow? A first attempt to answer these questions was made by the researchers in favor of the “prosodic bootstrapping” theory. Indeed, the speech signal is very rich and redundant and contains a lot of information about important linguistic units. Moreover, adults use a very specific register when addressing to their child, the motherese (child-directed speech), which provides a simplified language model with very specific phonological and prosodic characteristics. In addition, there is a lot of information provided by the social context, the importance of joint attention, and the multimodal essence of language. All those mechanisms play an important role in reducing the indeterminacy of the referent target or meaning during interactions between the child and their parents. The current paper represents an attempt to sketch a scenario to describe the processes of language acquisition at the very beginning of life, which really considers the child-directed speech as a privileged learning environment to facilitate this process, in which discriminating (sounds, speech signals, etc.) is an important ability for babies.KeywordsPerceptionChild-directed speechLanguage acquisition

Language Perception Development

Chapter

Oct 2022

Cristina Name

This chapter aims to address the role that discrimination plays in infant language development, considering experimental evidence of infants’ abilities to discriminate acoustic and distributional properties of speech throughout their first year of life. Newborns and infants are able to distinguish phonetic contrasts of all languages, to discriminate speech signals from other nonlinguistic sounds, and to differentiate languages that belong to different rhythmic families. In contact with a language community, their discrimination capacities decline, and infants show a perceptual narrowing, becoming specialized to detect segmental, suprasegmental, and distributional properties of the language they are learning. Speech perception plays an important role in language acquisition, as acoustical and distributional characteristics perceived by infants allow them to discover the language properties (grammatical structure and lexicon). Also, it has an impact on later language development and children’s social interactions with native and nonnative language speakers.KeywordsPerceptual language developmentEarly discriminatory abilitiesLanguage acquisition

Emergence of the cortical encoding of phonetic features in the first year of life

Preprint

Full-text available

Oct 2022

Even prior to producing their first words, infants are developing a sophisticated speech processing system, with robust word recognition present by 4-6 months of age. These emergent linguistic skills, observed with behavioural investigations, are likely to rely on increasingly sophisticated neural underpinnings. The infant brain is known to robustly track the speech envelope, however to date no cortical tracking study could investigate the emergence of phonetic feature encoding. Here we utilise temporal response functions computed from electrophysiological responses to nursery rhymes to investigate the cortical encoding of phonetic features in a longitudinal cohort of infants when aged 4, 7 and 11 months, as well as adults. The analyses reveal an increasingly detailed and acoustically-invariant phonetic encoding over the first year of life, providing the first direct evidence that the pre-verbal human cortex learns phonetic categories. By 11 months of age, however, infants still did not exhibit adult-like encoding.

Bibliographie générale

Chapter

Nov 2010

Self and Identity: An Exploration of the Development, Constitution and Breakdown of Human Selfhood

Book

Oct 2022

Matthew Tieu

What is a self? What does it mean to have selfhood? What is the relationship between selfhood and identity? These are puzzling questions that philosophers, psychologists, social scientists, and many other researchers often grapple with. Self and Identity is a book that explores and brings together relevant ideas on selfhood and identity, while also helping to clarify some important and long standing scientific and philosophical debates. It will enable readers to understand the difference between selves in humans and other animals, and the different selves that we come to possess from when we are born to when we become old. It also explains how and why the self might break down due to mental illness, thereby providing insight into how we might treat illnesses such as dementia and depression, both of which are conditions that fundamentally affect our selfhood. Taking an important step towards clarifying our understanding of human selfhood and applying it to mental illness, this book will be of great interest to researchers and postgraduate students exploring philosophical questions of selfhood, as well as those examining the connection to clinical disorders.

The impact of perceived emotions on toddlers' word learning

Article

Full-text available

May 2022

Others' emotional expressions affect individuals' attention allocation in social interactions, which are integral to the process of word learning. However, the impact of perceived emotions on word learning is not well understood. Two eye‐tracking experiments investigated 78 British toddlers' (37 girls) of 29‐ to 31‐month‐old retention of novel label‐object and emotion‐object associations after hearing labels presented in neutral, positive, and negative affect in a referent selection task. Overall, toddlers learned novel label‐object associations regardless of the affect associated with objects but showed an attentional bias toward negative objects especially when emotional cues were presented (d = 0.95), suggesting that identifying the referent to a label is a competitive process between retrieval of the learned label‐object association and the emotional valence of distractors.

Habla conmigo, daddy! Fathers’ language input in North American bilingual Latinx families

Article

Full-text available

Jan 2022

This study examines the language environments of bilingually raised Latinx infants (n = 37) in mother-father families of diverse socioeconomic backgrounds, with a focus on paternal parentese, a speaking style distinguished by higher pitch, slower tempo, and exaggerated intonation. Two daylong audio recordings were collected on weekends, when both parents were at home. Paternal, maternal, and infant speech variables were quantified through automatic and manual analyses. Most infants experienced Spanish and English within child-directed speech, and language mixing was common in mothers and fathers. Adjusting for demographic variables, infants heard 50.4% less talk from men compared to women, and 43.4% less parentese from fathers compared to mothers. However, when controlling for overall speech amount, the rate of parentese use did not differ between mothers and fathers, demonstrating that, contrary to the stereotype, fathers in Latinx families adjust their speech in verbal interactions with their infants. An asymmetry emerged, where paternal parentese was associated with paternal knowledge of language development but not with paternal involvement in childcare responsibilities; the opposite was true for paternal speech amount. Controlling for maternal contributions, paternal parentese was predictive of concurrent parent-infant turn-taking and infant language vocalizations, demonstrating its important role in infant language development.

Syllabic pitch perception in 2- to 3-month-old infants

Article

Full-text available

Jan 1989

The pitch patterns present in speech addressed to infants may play an important role in perceptual processing by infants. In this study, the high-amplitude sucking procedure was used to assess discrimination by 2- to 3-month-old infants of rising versus falling pitch patterns in 400-msec synthetic [ra] and [la] tokens. The syllables’ intonation contour was modeled on infant-directed speech, and covered a range characteristic of an adult female speaker (180–300 Hz). Group data indicated that the 2- to 3-month-old infants discriminated the pitch contour for both stimuli. Results are discussed with reference to previous studies of syllabic pitch perception.

Infant Preference for Both Male and Female Infant-Directed Talk: A Developmental Study of Attentional and Affective Responsiveness

Article

Full-text available

Jul 1989
Rev Canad Psychol

This research increases our understanding of infants' preference for "motherese" by demonstrating that this preference extends to infant-directed talk (IDT) delivered by males as well as females and that infants show both more attentional responsiveness and more affective responsiveness to IDT than to adult-directed talk (ADT). Infants aged 4-5.5 and 7.5-9 months were shown video recordings of male and female adults reciting identical scripts in either IDT or ADT. Attentional preference was measured by the amount of time the infants watched in each condition, and affective responsiveness was measured by two trained raters. Overall, it was found that infants of both ages show greater attentional and affective responsiveness to IDT than to ADT when spoken by either a male or a female. The younger group was also found to be more responsive, on both measures, than the older group. Of perhaps greater significance, it was shown that the behaviour infants displayed in response to IDT makes them more attractive to naive adult judges. This suggests that IDT may facilitate and maintain positive adult-infant interactions.

Higher pitch in BT is not universal: Acoustic evidence from Quiche Mayan

Article

Full-text available

Nov 1984

Although higher pitch has been described as a universal feature of babytalk (BT) registers worldwide, analysis of a sample of three Quiche Mayan-speaking mothers addressing their infant children indicated that their BT register does not utilize this feature. Quiche mothers either make no pitch distinction in speech to young children, or actually lower pitch slightly in comparison with their Adult–Adult interaction style. A comparison group of American mothers raised pitch 35–70 Hz when addressing infants of the same age and language maturity. We posit that pitch-raising strategies may be sociolinguistically determined and may serve different functions across languages.

The Current Status of the Motherese Hypothesis

Article

Full-text available

Mar 1984

Partially conflicting results from correlational studies of maternal speech style and its effects on child language learning motivate a comparative discussion of Newport, Gleitman & Gleitman (1977) and Furrow, Nelson & Benedict (1979), and a reanalysis of the original Newport et al. data. In the current analysis the data are from two groups of children equated for age, in response to the methodological questions raised by Furrow et al.; but, in line with the original Newport et al. analysis, linguistic differences between these age-equated children are handled by partial correlation. Under this new analysis the original results reported by Newport et al. are reproduced. In addition, however, most effects of the mother on the child's language growth are found to be restricted to a very young age group. Moreover, the new analysis suggests that increased complexity of maternal speech is positively correlated with child language growth in this age range. The findings are discussed in terms of a theoretical analysis of the Motherese Hypothesis; the conditions of both learner and environment in which ‘simplified’ data could aid a learner. Finally, the results of our past work, those of Furrow et al., and those of the present analysis, are discussed as they fit into, and add to, current theorizing about the language acquisition process.

DeCaspar, A.J. & Fifer, W.P. Of human bonding: newborns prefer their mothers' voice. Science 208, 1174-1176

Article

Full-text available

Jul 1980

By sucking on a nonnutritive nipple in different ways, a newborn human could produce either its mother's voice or the voice of another female. Infants learned how to produce the mother's voice and produced it more often than the other voice. The neonate's preference for the maternal voice suggests that the period shortly after birth may be important for initiating infant bonding to the mother.

Home Environment and Early Cognitive Development: Integration, Meta-analyses, and Conclusions

Chapter

Dec 1984

Allen W. Gottfried

Maternal Speech to Infants in a Tonal Language: Support for Universal Prosodic Features in Motherese

Article

Jan 1988

The prosodic features of maternal speech addressed to 2-month-old infants were measured quantitatively in a tonal language, Mandarin Chinese, to determine whether the features are similar to those observed in nontonal languages such as English and German. Speech samples were recorded when 8 Mandarin-speaking mothers addressed an adult and their own infants. Eight prosodic features were measured by computer: fundamental frequency (pitch), frequency range per sample, frequency range per phrase, phrase duration, pause duration, number of phrases per sample, number of syllables per phrase, and the proportion of phrase time as opposed to pause time per sample. Results showed that fundamental frequency was significantly higher and exhibited a larger range over the entire sample as well as a larger range per phrase in infant-directed as opposed to adult-directed speech. Durational analyses indicated significantly shorter utterances and longer pauses in infant-directed speech. Significantly fewer phrases per sample, fewer syllables per phrase, and less phrase-time per sample occurred in infant-directed speech. This pattern of results for Mandarin motherese is similar to that reported in other languages and suggests that motherese may exhibit universal prosodic features.

Paralinguistic Features of Adult Speech to Infants and Small Children

Article

Apr 1983

The propensity to raise and vary the pitch of one's voice when addressing an infant or small child was investigated in a sample of 16 male and 16 female adults, half of whom were married with children and half of whom had never married and never had children. Fundamental frequency was assessed using a sound spectrograph. Mean fundamental frequency and average variability both increased significantly over baseline when subjects were asked to imagine speaking to an infant or small child and increased significantly again when an infant or a small child was actually present. Nonparents who had little prior experience with infants modified their fundamental frequency as much as parents. Sex of speaker was not significantly related to the modification of fundamental frequency when sex differences in range of modal frequency were held constant. These modifications in vocal frequency may be attributable either to a biologically based propensity in the adult speaker or to attentional feedback from the infant or small child.

Expanded contours in mothers' speech to newborns

Article

Jan 1984

Examined the prosodic characteristics of "motherese" in the speech of 24 German mothers to their newborns. Each S was recorded in 3 observational conditions, while addressing (1) her 3–5 day old baby (MB speech), (2) the absent infant as if present (simulated MB speech), and (3) the adult interviewer (MA speech). For each S, 2-min speech samples from each condition were acoustically analyzed. It was found that in MB speech, Ss spoke with higher pitch, wider pitch excursions, longer pauses, shorter utterances, and more prosodic repetition than in MA speech. 77% of the utterances in the MB speech sample conformed to a limited set of prosodic patterns that occurred only rarely in adult-directed speech (i.e., they consisted of characteristic expanded intonation contours, or they were whispered). The prosody of mothers' speech is discussed in terms of its immediate influence within the context of mother–infant interaction, as well as its potential long-range contribution to perceptual, social, and linguistic development. The exaggerated, rhythmic vocalizations of mothers' speech to newborns may serve to regulate infant attention and responsiveness and later contribute to prelinguistic skills. (36 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)

Intonation contours as signals in maternal speech to prelinguistic infants

Article

Sep 1982

The utterances of 6 mothers to their 2-, 4-, and 6-mo-old infants were analyzed to determine the type of grammatical sentence, the pitch contour of the utterance, and whether the infant was gazing and smiling at the mother at the time of her utterance. Two contours were context specific for all mothers: Rising contours were used when the infant was not visually attending and the mother "wanted" eye contact; sinusoidal and bell-shaped contours were used when the infant was gazing and smiling at the mother and she wanted to maintain the infant's positive affect and gaze. Different mothers used different contours to elicit smiling when the infant was gazing but not smiling at her. Mothers also used specific pitch contours for specific types of sentences. Yes–no questions had rise contours, and "wh" questions and commands generally had fall contours. Declarative sentences had sinusoidal–bell contours rather than the fall contours. (31 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)

Maternal Speech to Infants in a Tonal Language: Support for Universal Prosodic Features in Motherese

Article

Jan 1988

The significance of speech to newborns

Article

Sep 1980

Samples of speech to newborn infants in a nursery showed that most of the hospital staff, men and women, spoke to most of the infants even from the 1st day of the infants' lives. 10 2-hr samples taken over a period of 2 mo provided a total of 1,124 comprehensible utterances. The adults' speech was extensive, grammatically well formed, and almost entirely limited to comments on the infants' behavior and characteristics and to verbalizations of the adults' own caretaking activities. Their speech displayed a warm regard for the infants as well as efforts to instruct them on how they should behave for their own good. Findings led to the conclusions that newborns were already powerful evokers of speech, that speech exposed them to a fair sample of the language of their culture, and that speech provided experiences of consequence for the development of social behavior. (14 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)

Syllables as signals for 2-day-old infants

Article

Jul 1990
INFANT BEHAV DEV

Neonates demonstrated two-stimulus auditory operant discrimination by altering nonnutritive sucking patterns during an 18-min session. Discriminative stimuli were two isolated, repeated syllables, and reinforcers were a recording of mother's adult-directed speech and quiet. During the final 6 min, 16 of 20 subjects (M age = 55 hours) initiated bursts of sucking relatively more frequently during the syllable which signalled the availability of the recording of mother's voice versus quiet. In addition to providing new evidence of newborn speech perception and learning capacities, the results suggest a useful method for investigating neonatal auditory perception.

A method for the measurement of infant auditory selectivity

Article

Mar 1981
INFANT BEHAV DEV

In 2 experiments, 30 57-158 day old infants were presented with varying auditory stimuli contingent upon their fixation to identical but separate visual targets. Differential responses were found in total fixation time to targets on the basis of the auditory stimulus associated with them. This method for assessment of auditory selectivity can be used with infants as young as 4 mo. (22 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2008 APA )

Acoustic determinants of infant preference for motherese speech

Article

Jul 1987
INFANT BEHAV DEV

Three experiments investigated possible acoustic determinants of the infant listening preference for motherese speech found by Fernald 1985. To test the hypothesis that the intonation of motherese speech was sufficient to elicit this preference, it was necessary to eliminate lexical content and to isolate the three major acoustic correlates of intonation: (1) fundamental frequency (Fo), or pitch; (2) amplitude, correlated with loudness; and (3) duration, related to speech rhythm. Three sets of auditory reinforcers were computer-synthesized, derived from the Fo (Experiment 1), amplitude (Experiment 2), and duration (Experiment 3) characteristics of the infant- and adult-directed natural speech samples used by Fernald 1985. Thus, each of these experiments focused on particular prosodic variables in the absence of segmental variation. Twenty 4-month-old infants were tested in an operant auditory preference procedure in each experiment. Infants showed a significant preference for the Fo-patterns of motherese speech, but not for the amplitude or duration patterns of motherese.

Prenatal experience with sounds influence neonatal perception of maternal voice samples

Article

Apr 1987
INFANT BEHAV DEV

By sucking on a nonnutritive nipple in the presence of one discriminative stimulus, newborns were reinforced with a low-pass filtered tape recording of their mothers' voices. Sucking in the presence of a different discriminative stimulus was reinforced with unfiltered maternal-voice recordings. Filtered versions simulated maternal-voice sounds that were available before birth and unfiltered versions simulated maternal-voice sounds available after birth. Newborns in the control group could be reinforced with the same stimuli in the same way, but the voices were unfamiliar to them. Infants hearing their mothers' voices had no preference for either version, but infants hearing the unfamiliar voices preferred the unfiltered version. The difference in the between-groups responsiveness to the low-pass voice samples is consistent with the hypothesis that prenatal experience with low-frequency characteristics of maternal voices influences early postnatal perception of maternal voices.

A precursor of language acquisition I young infants

Article

Aug 1988
COGNITION

Four-day-old French and 2-month-old American infants distinguish utterances in their native languages from those of another language. In contrast, neither group gave evidence of distinguishing utterances from two foreign languages. A series of control experiments confirmed that the ability to distinguish utterances from two different languages appears to depend upon some familiarity with at least one of the two languages. Finally, two experiments with low-pass-filtered versions of the samples replicated the main findings of discrimination of the native language utterances. These latter results suggest that the basis for classifying utterances from the native language may be provided by prosodic cues.RésuméDeux groupes de bébés de communautés linguistiques différentes ont été testés sur leurs capacités à discriminer des séquences de discours spontané prononcées par un locuteur bilingue en deux langues différentes. Des nouveau-nés des quatre jours, français, sont capables de discriminer des séquences en français de séquences similaires en russe. Des nourrisson américains de deux mois ont manifesté un comportement similaire en présence de séquences en anglais et en italien. Cependant aucun groupe d'enfants ne montre de réponse de discrimination pour des séquences extraites de deux langues étrangéres (français, russe pour les enfants américains; anglais, italien pour les nouveau-nés français). Ceci est également le cas pour des nouveau-nés étrangers nés en France, en présence d'énoncés en français et en russe. Ainsi pour discriminer des énoncés de deux langues différentes, une certaine familiarité avec l'une d'entre elles semble nécessaire. Enfin les nouveau-nés et les nourrissons ont également montré des réactions de discrimination pour des versions filtrées des énoncés. Ces derniers résultats suggérent que les enfants pourraient classer les énoncés comme appartenant à leur langue maternelle sur la base d'indices prosodiques.

Prenatal maternal speech influencesnewborn' perception of speech sound

Article

Apr 1986
INFANT BEHAV DEV

Pregnant women recited a particular speech passage aloud each day during their last 6 weeks of pregnancy. Their newborns were tested with an operant-choice procedure to determine whether the sounds of the recited passage were more reinforcing than the sounds of a novel passage. The previously recited passage was more reinforcing. The reinforcing value of the two passages did not differ for a matched group of control subjects. Thus, third-trimester fetuses experience their mothers' speech sounds and that prenatal auditory experience can influence postnatal auditory preferences.

Four-month-old infants prefer to listen to Motherese

Article

Apr 1985
INFANT BEHAV DEV

Anne Fernald

The speech register used by adults with infants and young children, known as motherese, is linguistically simplified and characterized by high pitch and exaggerated intonation. This study investigated infant selective listening to motherese speech. The hypothesis tested was that infants would choose to listen more often to motherese when given the choice between a variety of natural infant-directed and adult-directed speech samples spoken by four women unfamiliar to the subjects. Forty-eight 4-month-old infants were tested in an operant auditory preference procedure. Infants showed a significant listening preference for the motherese speech register.

The intrauterine heartbeat: A potent reinforcer for newborns

Article

Jan 1983
INFANT BEHAV DEV

Intrauterine heartbeat sounds effectively reinforced human newborns' responding in an operant learning task. Reinforcing only those sucking bursts that followed short intervals since the last burst increased the relative frequency of short intervals, and reinforcing only those long intervals occurring between bursts increased the frequency of long ones. These results support the evidence suggesting that in-utero auditory experience affects postnatal behavior in humans.

Infant Recognition of Mother's Voice

Article

Feb 1978

Each of a group of one-month-old infants was reinforced, contingent upon nonutritive sucking, with its mother's voice and the voice of a stranger. In this experiment, two conditions were applied. Under the first, the mother's speech was aimed at communicating with the infant, while, under the second, the mother's speech lacked prosodic and intonational aspects of normal speech. It was shown that infants will suck more for their mother's voices under the intonanted condition only. It was concluded that a young infant prefers its own mother's voice provided the mother speaks normally.

The language environment of the young infant: Implications for early perceptual development

Article

Jul 1989
Rev Canad Psychol

The purpose of this article is to review recent research on the young infant's use of voice-specific as well as voice-nonspecific auditory information during early language processing, to suggest a possible mechanism that biases the young infant towards this information, and to discuss potential implications of the early saliency of this information for later language development. Auditory preferences expressed by young infants are of interest because they demonstrate which properties of complex auditory events are effective in capturing the infant's attention. Moreover, the presence of such auditory preferences has led to speculations about their possible origins in both pre- and postnatal auditory experience. Research examining the role of early auditory experience in the formation of preferences is presented, along with a discussion of how the constrained nature of early auditory experience (particularly prenatal) may bias the young infant towards specific features of maternal as well as nonmaternal speech.

Intonation and Communicative Intent in Mothers' Speech to Infants: Is the Melody the Message?

Article

Jan 1990

Anne Fernald

This study explores the power of intonation to convey meaningful information about the communicative intent of the speaker in speech addressed to preverbal infants and in speech addressed to adults. Natural samples of infant- and adult-directed speech were recorded from 5 mothers of 12-month-old infants, in 5 standardized interactional contexts: Attention-bid, Approval, Prohibition, Comfort, and Game/Telephone. 25 infant-directed and 25 adult-directed vocalizations were electronically filtered to eliminate linguistic content. The content-filtered speech stimuli were presented to 80 adult subjects: 40 experienced parents and 40 students inexperienced with infants. The subjects' task was to identify the communicative intent of the speaker using only prosodic information, given a 5-alternative forced choice. Listeners were able to use intonation to identify the speaker's intent with significantly higher accuracy in infant-directed speech than in adult-directed speech. These findings suggest that the prosodic patterns of speech to infants are more informative than those of adult-adult speech, and may provide the infant with reliable cues to the communicative intent of the speaker. The interpretation of these results proposed here is that the relation of prosodic form to communicative function is made uniquely salient in the melodies of mothers' speech, and that these characteristic prosodic patterns are potentially meaningful to the preverbal infant.

Discrimination of frequency transitions by human infants

Article

Sep 1989

Richard N. Aslin

Difference limens (DLs) for linear frequency transitions using a 1.0-kHz pulsed-tone standard were obtained from 6- to 9-month-old human infants in a series of three experiments. A repeating standard "yes-no" operant headturning technique and an adaptive staircase (tracking) procedure were used to obtain difference limens from a total of 71 infants. The DLs for 300-ms upward and downward linear frequency sweeps were approximately 3%-4% when the repeating standard was an unmodulated 1.0-kHz pulsed tone of 300-ms duration. These DLs for frequency sweeps were not significantly different from DLs for frequency increments and decrements using 330-ms pulsed tones [J. M. Sinnott and R. N. Aslin, J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 78, 1986-1992 (1985)]. The DLs for frequency sweeps of 50 ms appended to the beginning or the end of a 250-ms unmodulated 1.0-kHz tone were approximately 6%-7%. This greater DL for brief frequency sweeps was confirmed by varying the duration but not the extent of the sweep. Finally, DLs were greater than 50% when the repeating standard was a 50-ms rising or falling frequency sweep appended to the beginning of a 250-ms unmodulated 1.0-kHz tone. These results suggest that rapid frequency transitions are much more difficult to discriminate from frequency transitions of the same category (rising or falling) than from either a frequency transition of the opposite category (falling or rising) or an unmodulated tone.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)

A cross-language study of prosodic modifications in mothers' and fathers' speech to preverbal infants

Article

Nov 1989

This study compares the prosodic modifications in mothers' and fathers' speech to preverbal infants in French, Italian, German, Japanese, British English, and American English. At every stage of data collection and analysis, standardized procedures were used to enhance the comparability across data sets that is essential for valid cross-language comparison of the prosodic features of parental speech. In each of the six language groups, five mothers and five fathers were recorded in semi-structured home observations while speaking to their infant aged 0;10-1;2 and to an adult. Speech samples were instrumentally analysed to measure seven prosodic parameters: mean fundamental frequency (f0), f0-minimum, f0-maximum, f0-range, f0-variability, utterance duration, and pause duration. Results showed cross-language consistency in the patterns of prosodic modification used in parental speech to infants. Across languages, both mothers and fathers used higher mean-f0, f0-minimum, and f0-maximum, greater f0-variability, shorter utterances, and longer pauses in infant-directed speech than in adult-directed speech. Mothers, but not fathers, used a wider f0-range in speech to infants. American English parents showed the most extreme prosodic modifications, differing from the other language groups in the extent of intonational exaggeration in speech to infants. These results reveal common patterns in caretaker's use of intonation across languages, which may function developmentally to regulate infant arousal and attention, to communicate affect, and to facilitate speech perception and language comprehension. In addition to providing evidence for possibly universal prosodic features of speech to infants, these results suggest that language-specific variations are also important, and that the findings of the numerous studies of early language input based on American English are not necessarily generalisable to other cultures.

Syllabic pitch perception in 2- to 3-month-old infants

Article

Feb 1989

The pitch patterns present in speech addressed to infants may play an important role in perceptual processing by infants. In this study, the high-amplitude sucking procedure was used to assess discrimination by 2- to 3-month-old infants of rising versus falling pitch patterns in 400-msec synthetic [ra] and [la] tokens. The syllables' intonation contour was modeled on infant-directed speech, and covered a range characteristic of an adult female speaker (180-300 Hz). Group data indicated that the 2- to 3-month-old infants discriminated the pitch contour for both stimuli. Results are discussed with reference to previous studies of syllabic pitch perception.

How prosodic cues in Motherese might assist language learning

Article

Feb 1989

The function of motherese has become a pivotal issue in the language-learning literature. The current research takes the approach of asking whether the prosodic characteristics that are distinctive to motherese could play a special role in facilitating the acquisition of syntax. Hirsh-Pasek, Kemler Nelson, Jusczyk, Cassidy, Druss & Kennedy (1987) showed that infants aged 0;7-0;10 are sensitive to prosodic cues that would help them segment the speech stream into perceptual units that correspond to clauses. The present study shows that infants' sensitivity to segment-marking cues in ongoing speech holds for motherese but not for adult-directed speech. The finding is that, for motherese only, infants orient longer to speech that has been interrupted at clausal boundaries than to matched speech that has been interrupted at within-clause locations. This selective preference indicates that the prosodic qualities of motherese provide infants with cues to units of speech that correspond to grammatical units of language-a potentially fundamental contribution of motherese to the learning of syntax.

Discrimination of polysyllabic sequences by 1- to 4-month-old infants

Article

May 1985

Roanne K Karzon

The goal of this research was to ascertain the effects of suprasegmental parameters (fundamental frequency, amplitude, and duration) on discrimination of polysyllabic sequences by 1- to 4-month-old infants. A high-amplitude sucking procedure, with synthesized female speech, was used. Results indicate that young infants can discriminate the three-syllable sequences [marana] versus [malana] when suprasegmental characteristics typical of infant-directed speech emphasize the middle syllable. However, infants failed to demonstrate discrimination when adult-directed suprasegmentals were used and in several other experimental conditions in which prosodic parameters were manipulated. The pattern of results obtained in the six experiments suggests that the exaggerated suprasegmentals of infant-directed speech may function as a perceptual catalyst, facilitating discrimination by focusing the infant's attention on a distinctive syllable within polysyllabic sequences.

The effects of intonation on infant attention: The role of the rising intonation contour

Article

Nov 1983

The study was designed to investigate 2-month-old infant preferential attention to a feature found to be characteristic of mothers' speech to their infants. A modified infant-control auditory preference paradigm was employed to assess infants' differential attention to synthetically generated and naturally produced rising and falling intonation contours. Analysis of these data revealed that the infants attended more to the rising naturally produced intonation contour. A reverse pattern of greater attention to the falling contour was found with the synthetically generated stimuli. In addition, inspection of the results permitted the conclusion that the infant-control preference paradigm was a viable method for assessing the 2-month-old infant's preferential attention to auditory stimuli. The results are discussed in terms of their relevance to the study of the infant's developing language reception abilities.

The prosody of maternal speech: Infant age and context related changes

Article

Mar 1983

The speech of 6 mothers to their healthy infants was examined longitudinally during the neonatal period and at 4, 12, and 24 months in a semi-naturalistic setting. Features of speech analysed were: contour of fundamental frequency, repetitiveness, timing (durations of vocalizations and pauses), tempo and MLU. The neonatal period was characterized by elongated pauses. During the 4-month period the extent of pitch contouring and repetitiveness was greater than at earlier or later ages. By 24 months, the duration of vocalizations and length of MLU became markedly greater. The period of intense face-to-face interaction around the fourth month proved to involve more changes in certain prosodic features. Some of the possible functions of these changes during this phase are discussed.

Unpublished doctoral dissertation

R K Panneton

Preference for Infant‐directed Speech in the First Month after Birth

Abstract

No full-text available

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