Reliability of Listener Judgments of Infant Vocal Imitation.

Helen L Long,Dale A Bowman,D Kimbrough Oller

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2019.01340

Helen L Long, Dale A Bowman + Show 1 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.01340

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Abstract

There are many theories surrounding infant imitation; however, there is no research to our knowledge evaluating the reliability of listener perception of vocal imitation in prelinguistic infants. This paper evaluates intra- and inter-rater judgments on the degree of “imitativeness” in utterances of infants below 12 months of age. 18 listeners were presented audio segments selected from naturalistic recordings to represent in each case a parent vocal model followed by an infant utterance ranging from low to high degrees of imitativeness. The naturalistic data suggested vocal imitation occurred rarely across the first year, but strong intra- and inter-rater correlations were found for judgments of imitativeness. Our results suggest salience of the infant's vocal imitation despite its rare occurrence as well as active perception by listeners of the imitative signal. We discuss infant vocal imitation as a potential signal of well-being as perceived by caregivers.

Highlights

Imitation has been widely studied in infant and child development (Meltzoff and Moore, 1977; Meltzoff, 1988a,b; Kugiumutzakis, 1999; Jones, 2007; Imafuku et al, 2019)
We have found no dispute in the child development literature regarding the importance of infant abilities to imitate as a foundation for language learning
Others believe that infant imitation is present from birth as a way to map the actions of others who are “like me” onto a representation of their own actions to understand the psychological states of others and the self (Meltzoff, 2005, 2007) via active intermodal mapping (AIM) (Meltzoff and Moore, 1994, 1997) or via a mirror neuron system (Gallese and Goldman, 1998; Rizzolatti and Craighero, 2004; Simpson et al, 2015)

Summary

Introduction

Imitation has been widely studied in infant and child development (Meltzoff and Moore, 1977; Meltzoff, 1988a,b; Kugiumutzakis, 1999; Jones, 2007; Imafuku et al, 2019). The only data we know of on subjective judgments of infant imitation have been dichotomous ratings in experimental studies for the purposes of assessing coder reliability (Meltzoff and Moore, 1983, 1989; Meltzoff, 1988a,b; Barr et al, 1996; Carpenter et al, 1998; Collie and Hayne, 1999; Klein and Meltzoff, 1999; Sakkalou et al, 2013). This approach suggests that imitation is an all or nothing, binary skill. Our research will provide evidence of gradations in the extent of infant imitativeness and of the human listener ability to recognize such gradations

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