Infant Communicative Development Research Articles

Didactic adjustments in fathers' and mothers' speech to their 3-month-old infants

Vocal dialogues of 3-month-old infants with their mothers and fathers were recorded during dyadic interactions in the laboratory. Six-minute speech samples were analyzed for syntacticlexical and temporal-melodic features. Both parents adopted strikingly similar speech registers. Segmentation, reduction in syntactic complexity, repetitiveness, and slow tempo were more marked than reported for parental speech to children above 1 year. However, rather than providing proper linguistic models, parents utilized simplified patterns of expressive melodic contours as the most salient units of speech. This tendency is interpretable as age-specific adjustment to infants' integrative capacities. Structural similarities between maternal and paternal baby talk by far outweighed a few quantitative differences. The intuitive nature of recourse to basic nonverbal properties of vocal communication, together with universality across sex, favors the assumption that baby talk is a part of species-specific didactic support to infant communicative development.

Infant communicative development: Evidence from adoptive and biological families for genetic and environmental influences on rate differences.

Infant communicative development: Evidence from adoptive and biological families for genetic and environmental influences on rate differences.

Infant communicative development: Evidence from adoptive and biological families for genetic and environmental influences on rate differences.

Infant communicative development: Evidence from adoptive and biological families for genetic and environmental influences on rate differences.

An “expressive” infant's communication development

An “expressive” infant's communication development

Maternal Verbal Control Techniques with Young Infants During Mutual Gaze and Visual Co-Orientation Episodes

This study examined periods of mutual gaze and visual co-orientation between mothers and their 2-4 month-old infants as contexts for the utilization of maternal verbal control techniques; additional questions involved the impact of infant sex and maternal sensitivity upon the utilization of these techniques. Mothers and infants were videotaped during two experimental sessions, each of which was designed to enhance the occurrence of either mutual gaze or visual co-orientation. Results indicated that although a similar number of verbal control techniques occurred during mutual gaze and visual co-orientation sequences, visual context did have a significant effect upon the type of verbal control methods employed; in contrast, neither infant sex nor maternal sensitivity significantly influenced the utilization of these methods. These results demonstrate the importance of considering contextual factors when examining language/communication development; in addition, the implications of these findings for infant communication development are discussed.