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Histoire d’une recherche sur la conversation avec le nouveau-né
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The present study examined the ability of newborns and 2-month-olds to detect phonetic differences between syllables. By relying on the modified high-amplitude sucking procedure, which did not permit the infants to use a simple same-different response, the present experiments tapped the perceptual representations of the speech sounds. Infants as young as a few days old displayed some capacity to represent differences in a set of syllables varying in their phonetic composition, although there was no convincing evidenee that their representations were structured in terms of phonetic segments. Finally, evidence of developmental changes in speech processing were noted for the first time with infants in this age range. The change noted was a tendency from global toward more specific representations on the part of the older infants.
This chapter introduces the argument that emotions are proactive in the human mind. It suggests that the evolution of the social functions of emotions and inter-subjective behaviours in infancy lead to cultural learning and language acquisition. Emotions associated with the three different orientations of the body to experiences - to the self, toward a communicative person, and to inspect a thing outside the body - suggest that the newborn infant's mind already has different intentional forms of consciousness appropriate for these different uses.
Sensori-motor synchronization (SMS) is the coordination of rhythmic movement with an external rhythm. It plays a central role in motor, cognitive, and social behavior. SMS is commonly studied in adults and in children from four years of age onward. Prior to this age, the ability has rarely been investigated due to a lack of available methods. The present paper reviews what is known about SMS in young children, infants, newborns, and fetuses. The review highlights fetal and infant perception of rhythm and cross modal perception of rhythm, fetal, and infant production of rhythm and cross modal production of rhythm, and the contexts in which production of rhythm can be observed in infants. A primary question is whether infants, even newborns, can modify their spontaneous rhythmical motor behavior in response to external rhythmical stimulation. Spontaneous sucking, crying, and leg movements have been studied in the presence or absence of rhythmical auditory stimulation. Findings suggest that the interaction between movement and sound is present at birth and that SMS can be observed in special conditions and within a narrow range of tempi, particularly near the infant’s own spontaneous motor tempo. The discussion centers on the fundamental role of SMS in interaction and communication at the beginning of life.
A growing body of evidence is available about the functioning of foetal sensory systems during gestation. This article aims at reviewing data concerning (i) the accession of sensory stimulation to the foetal sensory receptors, (ii) the sequence of functional development of the major sensory systems (iii) the physiological and behavioural responses of foetuses to various types of stimulation. Human data are confronted to data collected in other mammalian species. Most studies have investigated auditory and chemosensory (olfactory and gustatory) responsiveness of the foetus in the second half of gestation. They demonstrate that (i) motor and autonomic (heart rate) responsiveness depends on gestational age and the properties of stimulations. Les performances sensorielles du foetus humain : un bref résumé des recherches. Le nombre des recherches expérimentales sur le développement fonctionnel des systèmes sensoriels chez le foetus s'accroît sensiblement. Cet article vise à passer en revue quelques-uns de ces résultats, en particulier en ce qui concerne 1) l'accès des stimulations sensorielles aux structures sensorielles qui les détectent; 2) la séquence du développement fonctionnel des systèmes sensoriels majeurs; 3) les réponses psychophysiologiques et comportementales des foetus à différentes stimulations. A cette date, la majorité des recherches a porté sur la réactivité auditive et chimiosensorielle (olfactive et gustative) au cours de la seconde moitié de la gestation, aussi bien chez le foetus humain que chez des foetus de mammifères non humains.
Pregnant women recited a short child's rhyme, “the target”, aloud each day between the thirty third and thirty seventh weeks of their fetuses' gestation. Then their fetuses were stimulated with tape recordings of the target and a control rhyme. The target elicited a decrease in fetal heartrate whereas the control did not. Thus, fetuses' exposure to specific speech sounds can affect their subsequent reactions to those sounds. More generally, the result suggests that third trimester fetuses become familiar with recurrent, maternal speech sounds.
63 mothers and their 3-day-old infants were observed during breast feeding. The analysis of dyadic vocal interaction suggested that during the neonatal period, the infant's vocalization is already responsive to both presence and absence of maternal vocalization. Maternal vocalization was shown to be responsive to antecedent vocal behavior of the newborn. No sex differences were found in the patterns of sequential vocal exchanges at this period. (17 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Three experiments, using the high-amplitude sucking procedure, tested whether 4-day-old infants discriminate multisyllabic utterances on the basis of number of syllables or number of phonemes. Exp 1 showed that infants discriminate 2 large sets of phonetically variable utterances composed of 2- vs 3-CV (consonant–vowel) syllables. Exp 2 was run to assess whether infants discriminated the 2 sets on the basis of duration differences between the 2- and 3-CV stimuli. Results indicate that reducing the duration differences does not affect infants' discrimination. Finally, Exp 3 investigated whether infants discriminate 4- vs 6-phoneme bisyllabic utterances. The results provide no evidence that infants are sensitive to such a change in number of phonemic constituents. Although not decisive, these results appear to be congruent with the hypothesis that infants perceptually structure complex speech inputs. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Previous studies showed that, from birth, speech and eye gaze are two important cues in guiding early face processing and social cognition. These studies tested the role of each cue independently; however, infants normally perceive speech and eye gaze together. Using a familiarization-test procedure, we first familiarized newborn infants (n = 24) with videos of unfamiliar talking faces with either direct gaze or averted gaze. Newborns were then tested with photographs of the previously seen face and of a new one. The newborns looked longer at the face that previously talked to them, but only in the direct gaze condition. These results highlight the importance of both speech and eye gaze as socio-communicative cues by which infants identify others. They suggest that gaze and infant-directed speech, experienced together, are powerful cues for the development of early social skills.
Human hearing develops progressively during the last trimester of gestation. Near-term fetuses can discriminate acoustic features, such as frequencies and spectra, and process complex auditory streams. Fetal and neonatal studies show that they can remember frequently recurring sounds. However, existing data can only show retention intervals up to several days after birth.
Here we show that auditory memories can last at least six weeks. Experimental fetuses were given precisely controlled exposure to a descending piano melody twice daily during the 35(th), 36(th), and 37(th) weeks of gestation. Six weeks later we assessed the cardiac responses of 25 exposed infants and 25 naive control infants, while in quiet sleep, to the descending melody and to an ascending control piano melody. The melodies had precisely inverse contours, but similar spectra, identical duration, tempo and rhythm, thus, almost identical amplitude envelopes. All infants displayed a significant heart rate change. In exposed infants, the descending melody evoked a cardiac deceleration that was twice larger than the decelerations elicited by the ascending melody and by both melodies in control infants.
Thus, 3-weeks of prenatal exposure to a specific melodic contour affects infants 'auditory processing' or perception, i.e., impacts the autonomic nervous system at least six weeks later, when infants are 1-month old. Our results extend the retention interval over which a prenatally acquired memory of a specific sound stream can be observed from 3-4 days to six weeks. The long-term memory for the descending melody is interpreted in terms of enduring neurophysiological tuning and its significance for the developmental psychobiology of attention and perception, including early speech perception, is discussed.
Three experiments investigated the ability of French newborns to discriminate between sets of sentences in different foreign languages. The sentences were low-pass filtered to reduce segmental information while sparing prosodic information. Infants discriminated between stress-timed English and mora-timed Japanese (Experiment 1) but failed to discriminate between stress-timed English and stress-timed Dutch (Experiment 2). In Experiment 3, infants heard different combinations of sentences from English, Dutch, Spanish, and Italian. Discrimination was observed only when English and Dutch sentences were contrasted with Spanish and Italian sentences. These results suggest that newborns use prosodic and, more specifically, rhythmic information to classify utterances into broad language classes defined according to global rhythmic properties. Implications of this for the acquisition of the rhythmic properties of the native language are discussed.
“Of all affairs” said the educationalist and philosopher John Dewey, “communication is the most wonderful” (Dewey, 1925, p. 135). There are several reasons why modern psychology would (and should) agree with this century old pronouncement. Communication – and its close conceptual relative, dialogue – creates and transforms not only the individuals involved in it, but the realm of meanings that could be involved in it. It is not only the key process within which psychological phenomena become manifest but also the key process through which the psychological sciences themselves derive their meanings and validate themselves. Communication is dramatically central in the lives of human adults in diverse spheres of life, of non human primates, of neurons in engagement with each other in an embodied world, of computer programmes and machines designed to ‘communicate’ and ‘respond’ in the contexts they are embedded in, and above all, in the lives of very young infants. And it has been studied extensively in all of these fields.
Searching for the mechanism of neonatal imitation resulted in the discovery of neonatal initiative capacity, here called “provocation”. Newborns spontaneously produced previously imitated gestures while waiting for the experimenter’s response. A psychophysiological analysis revealed that imitation was accompanied by heart rate increase while gesture initiation was accompanied by heart rate deceleration, suggesting different underlying mechanisms. Results imply that infants are not only capable of responding to a model movement by imitating, but that they also have the capacity to provoke an imitative response, thus sustaining an interaction. These findings may constitute a laboratory demonstration of the first dialogue and, according to our hypothetical model, they represent how human imprinting begins.
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.
The present longitudinal and naturalistic study aims to investigate infants' and fathers' facial expressions of emotions during pauses preceding and following spontaneous early infant–father conversation. Studying emotional expressions in the course of pauses in early infant–father interaction is important because it may extend our knowledge on how, without being able to speak, infants begin communication and develop a capacity to share understanding of what they and Significant Others (such as fathers) mean by what they do. Eleven infant–father dyads from Crete, Greece, were observed during their natural interactions at home from the second to the sixth month of life. The microanalysis of fathers' and infants' facial expressions of emotions provided evidence that: (a) in the course of pauses preceding and following early infant–father conversation, either the infant is interested in the father while the latter expresses pleasure to the infant, or the infant expresses external interest while the father is interested in the infant, (b) infants seem to attune their descending and stable emotional intensity to the same direction as their father's emotional intensity, (c) infants and fathers remain consistent in their emotional expression in the beginning and at the end of the pause, and (d) infant and paternal pleasure and interest did not change significantly across the nine age points of this study. Exploratory analysis of the relationship of paternal and infant emotional expressions across infants' birth order provided evidence of certain differences and similarities. It is proposed that pausal interruptions preceding and following free early infant–father ‘dialogues’ constitute interactive silences, since in their course there is evidence of inter-subjective emotional coordination and intra-subjective regulation of emotion. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
The functional maturity of the newborn infant's brain, the resemblances between neonatal imitation and imitation in adults and the possibly lateralized neonatal imitation suggest that the mirror neuron system may contribute to neonatal imitation. Newborn infants not only imitate but also initiate previously imitated gestures, and are able to participate in overlapping imitation–initiation communicative cycles. Additionally, these social responses in neonates are faster than previously thought, and may enable them to have long-lasting intimate interactions much before language develops. Infants are equipped with a powerful, innate, reciprocal communicative ability already at birth. The earliest communication originates from imitation and this communicative ability presumably later evolves to language. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
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.
Newborn infants whose mothers were monolingual speakers of Spanish or English were tested with audio recordings of female strangers speaking either Spanish or English. Infant sucking controlled the presentation of auditory stimuli. Infants activated recordings of their native language for longer periods than the foreign language.
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.
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.
To determine the sound environment of preterm infants cared for in the NICU and to test the hypothesis that infants exposed to more adult language will make more vocalizations.
This was a prospective cohort study of 36 infants who had a birth weight of ≤1250 g. Sixteen-hour recordings of the infant sound environment were made in the NICU from a digital language processor at 32 and 36 weeks' postmenstrual age. Adult word counts, infant vocalizations, and conversational turns were analyzed.
Infant vocalizations are present as early as 32 weeks. Both adult word counts per hour and infant vocalizations per hour increase significantly between 32 and 36 weeks. Infant exposure to language as a percentage of time was small but increased significantly. When a parent was present, infants had significantly more conversational turns per hour than when a parent was not present at both 32 and 36 weeks (P < .0001).
Preterm infants begin to make vocalizations at least 8 weeks before their projected due date and significantly increase their number of vocalizations over time. Although infant exposure to language increased over time, adult language accounted for only a small percentage of the sounds to which an infant is exposed in the NICU. Exposure to parental talk was a significantly stronger predictor of infant vocalizations at 32 weeks and conversational turns at 32 and 36 weeks than language from other adults. These findings highlight the powerful impact that parent talk has on the appearance and increment of vocalizations in preterm infants in the NICU.
The experiment reported here explores the ability of 4- to 5-day-old neonates to discriminate consonantal place of articulation and vowel quality using shortened CV syllables similar to those used by Blumstein and Stevens [J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 67, 648-662 (1980)], without vowel steady-state information. The results show that the initial 34-44 ms of CV stimuli provide infants with sufficient information to discriminate place of articulation differences in stop consonants ([ba] vs [da], [ba] vs [ga], [bi] vs [di], and [bi] vs [gi]) and following vowel quality ([ba] vs [bi], [da] vs [di], and [ga] vs [gi]). These results suggest that infants can discriminate syllables on the basis of the onset properties of CV signals. Furthermore, this experiment indicates that neonates require little or no exposure to speech to succeed in such a discrimination task.
The human neonate moves in precise and sustained synchronous organizations of change of movement with the articulated structure of adult speech as early as the first day of life. This complex and on going 'dance' of the neonate with human speech may necessitate conceptual revisions concerning the nature and functions of neonatal responsivity. In addition, present models of interaction may be found to be inadequate to account for entrainment and synchrony of this order. The present observations suggest a view of development in terms of the participation of the infant at the outset in multiple forms of interactional organization, rather than as an isolate.
Theories of communication often assume that communication has a single, essential form or telos, the culmination of a one-track developmental process where precursors eventually give rise to the real thing. At one time, this essence of communication was identified with linguistic competence, whereas now it is largely defined in terms of "Theory of Mind." But the fundamental problem with "Theory of Mind" is the very problem it pretends to solve: "the problem of other minds."That problem, as formulated, is insoluble, even with the aid of theory or innate modules. In this article, we reject the superficial depth psychology of "Theory of Mind" in favour of a breadth psychology based on context.
Human infants under 5 days of age consistently looked more at black-and-white patterns than at plain colored surfaces, which
indicates the innate ability to perceive form.
Of Human Bonding: Newborns Prefer Their Mothers' Voices
- DeCasper Anthony J.