The moment‐to‐moment pitch dynamics of child‐directed speech shape toddlers’ attention and learning

Young children have an overall preference for child‐directed speech (CDS) over adult‐directed speech (ADS), and its structural features are thought to facilitate language learning. Many studies have supported these findings, but less is known about processing of CDS at short, sub‐second timescales. How do the moment‐to‐moment dynamics of CDS influence young children's attention and learning? In Study 1, we used hierarchical clustering to characterize patterns of pitch variability in a natural CDS corpus, which uncovered four main word‐level contour shapes: ‘fall’, ‘rise’, ‘hill’, and ‘valley’. In Study 2, we adapted a measure from adult attention research—pupil size synchrony—to quantify real‐time attention to speech across participants, and found that toddlers showed higher synchrony to the dynamics of CDS than to ADS. Importantly, there were consistent differences in toddlers’ attention when listening to the four word‐level contour types. In Study 3, we found that pupil size synchrony during exposure to novel words predicted toddlers’ learning at test. This suggests that the dynamics of pitch in CDS not only shape toddlers’ attention but guide their learning of new words. By revealing a physiological response to the real‐time dynamics of CDS, this investigation yields a new sub‐second framework for understanding young children's engagement with one of the most important signals in their environment.     

Lexical Learning May Contribute to Phonetic Learning in Infants: A Corpus Analysis of Maternal Spanish

In their first year, infants begin to learn the speech sounds of their language. This process is typically modeled as an unsupervised clustering problem in which phonetically similar speech‐sound tokens are grouped into phonetic categories by infants using their domain‐general inference abilities. We argue here that maternal speech is too phonetically variable for this account to be plausible, and we provide phonetic evidence from Spanish showing that infant‐directed Spanish vowels are more readily clustered over word types than over vowel tokens. The results suggest that infants’ early adaptation to native‐language phonetics depends on their word‐form lexicon, implicating a much wider range of potential sources of influence on infants’ developmental trajectories in language learning.     

成人言语输入对儿童早期单词获得影响的个案追踪

追踪观察一名婴儿(6~20个月), 分析其中看护者的言语输入特征及婴儿早期词汇获得的发展变化。主要对成人言语输入中动、名词比例、单词在句中的位置、具体环境等因素及婴儿早期动、名词理解和产生等方面进行探讨。结果显示, 成人言语输入中动词比例显著高于名词, 更多动词位于句首或句尾使得主语和宾语省略; 同时, 这种动词优势的输入特征促进儿童早期动词获得, 使得婴儿早期语言样本中动、名词理解相对比例与成人言语输入一致。这一结果表明, 婴儿词汇发展初期就已经利用言语或社会线索, 同时这种早期词汇组成中较高的动词比例进一步支持“名词优势”理论存在跨语言差异     

Variation in the application of natural processes: Language-dependent constraints in the phonological acquisition of bilingual children

This paper studies phonological processes and constraints on early phonological and lexical development, as well as the strategies employed by a young Spanish-, Portuguese-, and Hebrew-speaking child—Nurit (the author's niece)—in the construction of her early lexicon. Nurit's linguistic development is compared to that of another Spanish-, Portuguese-, and Hebrew-speaking child—Noam (the author's son). Noam and Nurit's linguistic development is contrasted to that of Berman's (1977) English- and Hebrew-speaking daughter (Shelli). The simultaneous acquisition of similar (closely related languages) such as Spanish and Portuguese versus that of nonrelated languages such as English and Hebrew yields different results: Children acquiring similar languages seem to prefer maintenance as a strategy for the construction of their early lexicon, while children exposed to nonrelated languages appear to prefer reduction to a large extent (Faingold, 1990). The Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking children's high accuracy stems from a wider choice of target words, where the diachronic development of two closely related languages provides a simplified model lexicon to the child.     

Cultural transmission through infant signs: Objects and actions in U.S. and Taiwan

Infant signs are intentionally taught/learned symbolic gestures which can be used to represent objects, actions, requests, and mental state. Through infant signs, parents and infants begin to communicate specific concepts earlier than children’s first spoken language. This study examines whether cultural differences in language are reflected in children’s and parents’ use of infant signs. Parents speaking East Asian languages with their children utilize verbs more often than do English-speaking mothers; and compared to their English-learning peers, Chinese children are more likely to learn verbs as they first acquire spoken words. By comparing parents’ and infants’ use of infant signs in the U.S. and Taiwan, we investigate cultural differences of noun/object versus verb/action bias before children’s first language. Parents reported their own and their children's use of first infant signs retrospectively. Results show that cultural differences in parents’ and children’s infant sign use were consistent with research on early words, reflecting cultural differences in communication functions (referential versus regulatory) and child-rearing goals (independent versus interdependent). The current study provides evidence that intergenerational transmission of culture through symbols begins prior to oral language.     

The Influence of Child-Directed Speech on Word Learning and Comprehension

This paper describes an investigation into the function of child-directed speech (CDS) across development. In the first experiment, 10–21-month-olds were presented with familiar words in CDS and trained on novel words in CDS or adult-directed speech (ADS). All children preferred the matching display for familiar words. However, only older toddlers in the CDS condition preferred the matching display for novel words. In Experiment 2, children 3–6 years of age were presented with a sentence comprehension task in CDS or ADS. Older children performed better overall than younger children with 5- and 6-year-olds performing above chance regardless of speech condition, while 3- and 4-year-olds only performed above chance when the sentences were presented in CDS. These findings provide support for the theory that CDS is most effective at the beginning of acquisition for particular constructions (e.g. vocabulary acquisition, syntactic comprehension) rather than at a particular age or for a particular task.     

Playing with word endings: Morphological variation in the learning of Russian noun inflections

This paper documents the occurrence of form variability through diminutive ‘wordplay’, and examines whether this variability facilitates or hinders morphology acquisition in a richly inflected language. First, in a longitudinal speech corpus of eight Russian mothers conversing with their children (1.6–3.6), and with an adult, the use of diminutive word forms was shown to be pervasive in Russian child‐directed, but not adult‐directed speech. Importantly, all of the mothers were shown to routinely engage in alternating uses of diminutive and simplex forms of the same nouns within the same conversational episodes. Second, an elicitation experiment was conducted which tested 24 children's (2.7–4.2) productivity in inflecting novel nouns for case. By varying whether children heard the novel nouns in diminutive form, simplex form or both, we show that children benefit from the introduction of words in multiple forms (i.e. showing fewer case‐marking errors in this condition). We suggest that pragmatically motivated form variation in child‐directed speech (CDS) may have beneficial effects for acquiring richly inflected languages.     

Infant’s gaze in a teasing task with an experimenter or parent: A naturalistic approach

We assessed infant’s gaze in a teasing task in New York City public spaces. The task was administered to two different groups of 5- to 13-month-old infants. We used a between participants design across two studies. In Study 1 an experimenter administered the task to these infants (n = 79), whereas a parent did so in Study 2 (n = 79). The adult engaged the infant with a toy and then pulled it away to one side by counting to 7. A second trial to the other side was repeated. Infants passed the teasing task if they looked to the adult’s face within the first 5 seconds after removing the toy in at least one trial. In Study 1, we found that infants looked to the experimenter’s face after teasing by 7 months of age. In Study 2, infants did not show any significant gazes to the parent’s face after teasing at any age. Most trained parents successfully administered the teasing task to their infant. A teasing game played by an adult stranger (e.g., experimenter) may be optimal to elicit infant’s gaze in a naturalistic setting. Implications for developing cost-effective social-cognitive milestone measures in non-laboratory settings are discussed.     

The role of the input on the development of the LC bias: A crosslinguistic comparison

Previous studies have described the existence of a phonotactic bias called the Labial–Coronal (LC) bias, corresponding to a tendency to produce more words beginning with a labial consonant followed by a coronal consonant (i.e. “bat”) than the opposite CL pattern (i.e. “tap”). This bias has initially been interpreted in terms of articulatory constraints of the human speech production system. However, more recently, it has been suggested that this presumably language-general LC bias in production might be accompanied by LC and CL biases in perception, acquired in infancy on the basis of the properties of the linguistic input. The present study investigates the origins of these perceptual biases, testing infants learning Japanese, a language that has been claimed to possess more CL than LC sequences, and comparing them with infants learning French, a language showing a clear LC bias in its lexicon. First, a corpus analysis of Japanese IDS and ADS revealed the existence of an overall LC bias, except for plosive sequences in ADS, which show a CL bias across counts. Second, speech preference experiments showed a perceptual preference for CL over LC plosive sequences (all recorded by a Japanese speaker) in 13- but not in 7- and 10-month-old Japanese-learning infants (Experiment 1), while revealing the emergence of an LC preference between 7 and 10 months in French-learning infants, using the exact same stimuli. These crosslinguistic behavioral differences, obtained with the same stimuli, thus reflect differences in processing in two populations of infants, which can be linked to differences in the properties of the lexicons of their respective native languages. These findings establish that the emergence of a CL/LC bias is related to exposure to a linguistic input.     

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

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.     

Exposure to Parents’ Negative Emotions as a Developmental Pathway to the Family Aggregation of Depression and Anxiety in the First Year of Life

Depression and anxiety load in families. In the present study, we focus on exposure to parental negative emotions in first postnatal year as a developmental pathway to early parent-to-child transmission of depression and anxiety. We provide an overview of the little research available on the links between infants’ exposure to negative emotion and infants’ emotional development in this developmentally sensitive period, and highlight priorities for future research. To address continuity between normative and maladaptive development, we discuss exposure to parental negative emotions in infants of parents with as well as without depression and/or anxiety diagnoses. We focus on infants’ emotional expressions in everyday parent–infant interactions, and on infants’ attention to negative facial expressions as early indices of emotional development. Available evidence suggests that infants’ emotional expressions echo parents’ expressions and reactions in everyday interactions. In turn, infants exposed more to negative emotions from the parent seem to attend less to negative emotions in others’ facial expressions. The links between exposure to parental negative emotion and development hold similarly in infants of parents with and without depression and/or anxiety diagnoses. Given its potential links to infants’ emotional development, and to later psychological outcomes in children of parents with depression and anxiety, we conclude that early exposure to parental negative emotions is an important developmental mechanism that awaits further research. Longitudinal designs that incorporate the study of early exposure to parents’ negative emotion, socio-emotional development in infancy, and later psychological functioning while considering other genetic and biological vulnerabilities should be prioritized in future research.     

Exploring priming effects of social and non-social attention getters on older infants’ preferences for infant-directed speech

In infant research, various auditory/visual events are often used as attention getters to orient infants to a screen and alert them to upcoming information for their detection, discrimination, and/or recognition. Importantly, the influence of attention-getters on infants’ performance has rarely been systematically evaluated, even though these attention cues could be affecting subsequent information processing. This study investigated whether specific attention-getters could prime infants’ preferences for infant-directed speech (IDS) compared to adult-directed speech (ADS). Both a non-social and a social prime were chosen with the prediction that the social prime would strengthen infants' attention to IDS on a subsequent trial, but the non-social prime would have no differential effect on subsequent attention to either speech type. A total of 20 12- to 18-month old infants were presented with either a nonsocial (rotating form + chimes) or social (smiling female + voice) prime in an infant-controlled, speech preference procedure with both IDS and ADS speech types. Given previous research, we predicted that infants would show significantly more attention on trials during which looking produced IDS, but that this preference would be significantly augmented for infants in the condition receiving a social attention-getter before each trial. Results did not bear out this prediction, although we found a consistent, robust preference for IDS. The results will be discussed in terms of why these attention getters did not affect subsequent processing of two very different speech types, and what future modifications may be necessary in order to examine roles of attention getters in affecting experimental outcomes in infancy research. A secondary benefit of the findings is that we empirically established a growing preference for IDS in infants as old as 18-months of age.     

An association between mothers’ speech clarity and infants’ speech discrimination skills

The quality of speech directed towards infants may play an important role in infants’ language development. However, few studies have examined the link between the two. We examined the correlation between maternal speech clarity and infant speech perception performance in two groups of Mandarin‐speaking mother–infant pairs. Maternal speech clarity was assessed using the degree of expansion of the vowel space, a measure previously shown to reflect the intelligibility of words and sentences. Speech discrimination in the infants (6–8 and 10–12‐month‐olds) was measured using a head‐turn task. The results show that mothers’ vowel space area is significantly correlated with infants’ speech discrimination performance. Socioeconomic data from both parents show that the result cannot be attributed to parental socioeconomic factors. This study is correlational and therefore a causal relationship cannot be firmly established. However, the results are consistent with the view that maternal speech clarity directly affects infants’ early language learning.     

Perception of audiovisual infant directed speech

Infant perception often deals with audiovisual speech input and a first step in processing this input is to perceive both visual and auditory information. The speech directed to infants has special characteristics and may enhance visual aspects of speech. The current study was designed to explore the impact of visual enhancement in infant-directed speech (IDS) on audiovisual mismatch detection in a naturalistic setting. Twenty infants participated in an experiment with a visual fixation task conducted in participants’ homes. Stimuli consisted of IDS and adult-directed speech (ADS) syllables with a plosive and the vowel /a:/, /i:/ or /u:/. These were either audiovisually congruent or incongruent. Infants looked longer at incongruent than congruent syllables and longer at IDS than ADS syllables, indicating that IDS and incongruent stimuli contain cues that can make audiovisual perception challenging and thereby attract infants’ gaze.     

Observer Influences on Fathers and Mothers: An Experimental Manipulation of the Structure and Function of Parent – Infant Conversation

From studies over the past 20 years four contrasting hypotheses can be made about the nature of parent–infant communication: (1) mothers and fathers display similar skills to their infants and do not exert a differential influence on their development; (2) fathers are less sympathetic to their infants' level of development and therefore inadvertently stretch the child's development more than mothers; (3) both parents differentially socialize their sons' and daughters' early communicative skills; (4) any apparent differences between parents reflect their expectations about being observed. To examine these hypotheses together, this experiment records the communication of 10 mother–infant and 10 father–infant dyads in two conditions: when an observer was present or absent. The analysis revealed two patterns. Firstly, in keeping with most research on parent–child communication, mothers and fathers both simplified their speech to their infants in similar ways. Secondly, both the structure and function of parental communication showed differences between the two conditions and many of these differences were moderated by interactions between condition and sex of parent or child. The data thus provide more support for the first and fourth hypotheses cited above. It is suggested that analyses of parent–infant interaction should move away from simple assumptions about parental ‘influences’ upon children's development to consider the subtleties of different parental styles in different settings.     

Parent mind-mindedness,sensitivity, and infant affect: Implications for attachment with mothers and fathers

Previous research examining links between parenting and attachment has focused on behavioral aspects of parenting such as sensitivity. However, by assessing how parents reflect on infants’ mental states (mind-mindedness) we gain a broader understanding of parenting and how it impacts attachment. Mothers, fathers, and their infants (N = 135) participated in the Still Face Paradigm (SFP) at 3-, 5-, and 7- months of age, and the Strange Situation with mothers at 12 months and fathers at 14 months. Parent sensitivity and infant affect were coded from the SFP and all videos were transcribed and later coded for parents’ use of appropriate and non-attuned mind-mindedness toward their infants. Attachment with each parent was coded from the Strange Situation. Mixed effects models examined trajectories of parents’ mind-mindedness in relation to parent sensitivity and infant affect across attachment groups. Significant differences between parent gender and attachment category were detected. Specifically, parents who were less sensitive were also less mind-minded toward insecure-avoidant infants; parents used more non-attuned mind-mindedness when infants had higher negative affect. Findings suggest that, in addition to parent sensitivity, parents’ use of appropriate and non-attuned mind-mindedness during a parent-infant interaction provides insight into the developing attachment relationship for mothers and fathers.     

Exploring Child and Parent Factors in the Diagnostic Agreement on the Anxiety Disorders Interview Schedule

Worryingly low levels of parent–child agreement on child psychiatric diagnosis are reported. This study examined parent–child agreement on diagnostic categories and severity ratings with the Anxiety Disorders Interview Schedule, Child and Parents versions (ADIS-C/P). Children’s age, gender, motivation and self-concept and parent’s general psychopathology and diagnoses were examined. Participants were 110 children (aged 8–14 years) with a principal specific phobia diagnosis, and their parents. Findings revealed excellent parent–child agreement on principal specific phobia diagnosis (97.3%), and fair levels of concordance on most co-occurring secondary diagnoses. As expected, children with high motivation had generally stronger parent–child agreement on diagnoses and severity ratings (for ADHD p?p?p?相似文献