Abstract

Temporal coordination of vocal exchanges between mothers and their infants emerges from a developmental process that relies on the ability of communication partners to co-coordinate and predict each other’s turns. Consequently, the partners engage in communicative niche construction that forms a foundation for language in human infancy. While robust universals in vocal turn-taking have been found, differences in the timing of maternal and infant vocalizations have also been reported across cultures. In this study, we examine the temporal structure of vocal interactions in 38 mother–infant dyads in the first two years across two cultures—American and Lebanese—by studying observed and randomized distributions of vocalizations, focusing on both gaps and overlaps in naturalistic 10-min vocal interactions. We conducted a series of simulations using Kolmogorov–Smirnov (K–S) tests to examine whether the observed responsivity patterns differed from randomly generated simulations of responsivity patterns in both Arabic and English for mothers responding to infants and for infants responding to mothers. Results revealed that both mothers and infants engaged in conversational alternation, with mothers acting similarly across cultures. By contrast, significant differences were observed in the timing of infant responses to maternal utterances, with the Lebanese infants’ tendency to cluster their responses in the first half-second after the offset of the Lebanese mothers’ utterances to a greater extent than their American counterparts. We speculate that the results may be due to potential phonotactic differences between Arabic and English and/or to differing child-rearing practices across Lebanese and American cultures. The findings may have implications for early identification of developmental disorders such as autism spectrum disorders within and across cultures.

Highlights

  • Background on Parent–Infant InteractionConversational exchanges between mothers and their young children have been claimed to be ubiquitous across languages and cultures (Bateson, 1975; Stern et al, 1975; Fernald et al, 1989; Papoušek and Papoušek, 1989; Lavelli and Fogel, 2013) and a hallmark of human sociality (Levinson, 2016)

  • We found that the mothers appeared to engage in vocal alternation and behave in terms of vocal response timing with their infants within and across Lebanese and American cultures and across the first 2 years of life. This suggests that mothers may be responsive to their infants’ vocalizations in both cultures and may perceive their infants as capable communication partners, treating their vocalizations as intentional communication bids (Schieffelin and Ochs, 1986)

  • Our findings reveal within each culture that infants seem to respond contingently to mothers’ vocalizations: Lebanese infants followed Lebanese mothers vocally, and American infants followed American mothers vocally

Read more

Summary

Introduction

Conversational exchanges between mothers and their young children have been claimed to be ubiquitous across languages and cultures (Bateson, 1975; Stern et al, 1975; Fernald et al, 1989; Papoušek and Papoušek, 1989; Lavelli and Fogel, 2013) and a hallmark of human sociality (Levinson, 2016). These affectively charged interactions are temporally structured and seem to be shared across species (Takahashi et al, 2013), reflecting phylogenetic origins. In the case of Lebanese Arabic (one of the target languages in this study), it is presumable that word stress is predictable, this awaits empirical substantiation

Methods
Results
Discussion
Conclusion
Full Text
Published version (Free)

Talk to us

Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have

Schedule a call