Maternal Speech Research Articles

Mother–child verbal communication and preschoolers' inhibitory control

AbstractDespite growing research on parental influences on preschoolers' inhibitory control (IC), relatively little is known about the role of parental speech. This study explored the association between the pragmatic function (e.g., message or meaning) of maternal verbal communication and IC among preschoolers. Eighty‐three 4‐year‐olds (45 boys) and their mothers participated in this study. Observed during a game, conversations between children and their mothers were transcribed verbatim and classified as collaborative (e.g., support and guide) and noncollaborative (e.g., direct and negate) communication acts. Children's IC was assessed using lab tasks. Results showed that greater maternal noncollaborative communication acts were associated with poorer IC. Furthermore, the negative relationship between maternal noncollaborative communication acts and IC was significant for children who engaged in low and moderate, but not high, levels of noncollaborative communication acts. Finally, the relationship between maternal communication acts and IC did not vary according to child sex or collaborative communication acts when covariates were considered.Highlights Centering on the pragmatic function (i.e., message) of verbal communication between mothers and their 4‐year‐olds, we examined its relationship to children's inhibitory control (IC). Conversations between children and their mothers were transcribed and classified as collaborative (e.g., support and guide) and non‐collaborative (e.g., direct and negate) communication acts, and child IC was assessed using lab tasks. Higher levels of maternal non‐collaborative acts were significantly related to poorer IC. This negative association was further moderated by child non‐collaborative acts, which was significant only when children engaged in low or moderate, but not high, levels of non‐collaborative acts. Negative pragmatic messages conveyed in maternal speech are likely to be detrimental to early IC development. The way mothers and their 4‐year‐olds co‐construct their conversation also matters.

Maternal and paternal infant-directed speech to girls and boys: An exploratory study

ABSTRACTWe compared systematically the structure and the content of maternal and paternal speech to infant boys and girls while we also investigated the effect of infant’s age. Six girls and five boys were observed in the interaction with their mothers and their fathers (dyads came from the same families) at home from the second to the sixth month after birth at 15- day intervals. Detailed analysis of time revealed that fathers favour systematically the temporal structure of their speech to both girls and boys, while mothers favour boys in infant emotion/attention thematic sequences and girls in infant attention speech. Variations are counterbalanced in the way mothers and fathers respond sensitively to known marked changes in infant- parent communication over the first 6 months of life. These results are discussing in relation to the theory of innate intersubjectivity and the complementary company and care both parents give to developing infant girls and boys.

What Are the Effects of the Maternal Voice on Preterm Infants in the NICU?

Premature infants often experience extended stays in the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) as opposed to home with parents. This prolonged separation creates a strain for both parents and infants, decreasing attachment and parental caregiving. One strategy to combat this shared stress is increasing parental participation, particularly through the use of their voices whether parents are present or not. This Evidence-Based Practice Brief column explores the connection between mother and child, specifically the effects of maternal voice on infant autonomic stability, weight gain, and behavioral states. A systematic search of CINAHL, PubMed, and PsycInfo was used to identify studies involving the use of maternal voice intervention with preterm infants in the NICU. Fifteen studies were identified. Three intervention categories emerged: (1) live maternal speech, (2) recorded maternal speech (subcategories included whether intervention content was prescribed or not), and (3) recorded maternal speech that was combined with biological maternal sounds (heart rate). Within each category, studies were organized chronologically to reflect how knowledge has changed overtime. Maternal voice has physiological as well as behavioral and emotional effect on preterm infants. Several studies found that maternal voice increased autonomic stability improving (heart rate and respirations) as well as weight gain. No negative effects were identified. Given these findings, incorporating different types of maternal voice into routine care by the bedside nurse can assist the mother in feeling more involved in her infant's care without seemingly being a distraction or obstacle to providers. A major limitation for generalizability was sample size; more research is needed with larger sample sizes replicating interventions types to discern best outcomes.Video Abstract available at https://journals.lww.com/advancesinneonatalcare/Pages/videogallery.aspx?videoId=31&autoPlay=true.

Shared reading with preverbal infants and later language development

Studies of parent-child book reading tend to focus on parents of toddlers and preschool children, but not infants. This study examined features of parents' shared reading with preverbal infants in relation to children's early language development. Forty-four mothers of diverse socioeconomic status and their 10-month-old infants were observed during shared reading. Their interactions were coded for quantity and qualities of maternal speech and gesture, and for children's interest in the activity. The results indicate that maternal questions and child interest during shared reading at 10-months predicted children's expressive, receptive, and pragmatic language skills at 18-months, controlling for children's earlier skills and maternal education. Few relations were observed between family/child factors (e.g., education, child age) and features of the shared-reading interaction. Encouraging caregivers to question their preverbal infants during reading, and to help keep them engaged in the activity, could promote children's language learning.

Vocal and Tactile Input to Children Who Are Deaf or Hard of Hearing.

Purpose Caregivers may show greater use of nonauditory signals in interactions with children who are deaf or hard of hearing (DHH). This study explored the frequency of maternal touch and the temporal alignment of touch with speech in the input to children who are DHH and age-matched peers with normal hearing. Method We gathered audio and video recordings of mother-child free-play interactions. Maternal speech units were annotated from audio recordings, and touch events were annotated from video recordings. Analyses explored the frequency and duration of touch events and the temporal alignment of touch with speech. Results Greater variance was observed in the frequency of touch and its total duration in the input to children who are DHH. Furthermore, touches produced by mothers of children who are DHH were significantly more likely to be aligned with speech than touches produced by mothers of children with normal hearing. Conclusion Caregivers' modifications in the input to children who are DHH are observed in the combination of speech with touch. The implications for such patterns and how they may impact children's attention and access to the speech signal are discussed.

Understanding acoustic-phonetic environments of prelingual children with cochlear implants: Challenges, tools, and insights

Variability in auditory and linguistic environments experienced by prelingual children with cochlear implants (CIs) potentially helps explain variation in their language outcomes. Here, results are presented from several studies from our lab investigating early acoustic-phonetic environments of children with CIs. One collaborative study conducted over 10 years investigated individual differences in acoustic-phonetic quality of maternal speech as predictors of language outcomes in children with CIs. Results showed that properties of maternal speech recorded in the lab—as indexed in part by measures derived from vowel formants and fundamental frequency—significantly predicted infants’ language outcomes and growth on multiple standardized assessments two years after cochlear implantation. Other work has examined the usefulness of a widely adopted commercial automatic speech processing technology—the Language ENvironment Analysis (LENA) system—for investigating individual differences in auditory environments. Results from our study suggested considerable variability across samples in LENA’s accuracy at identifying adult speech, limiting LENA’s value for investigating individual differences in acoustic-phonetic input to children with CIs. Finally, an update is provided on current work using combined signal processing and hand-coding approaches aimed at investigating variability in acoustic input to children with CIs in their home environments. [Work supported by NIH grant R01DC008581.]

Concurrent associations between mothers' references to internal states and children's social understanding in middle childhood.

Although it is well established that features of maternal speech are associated with children’s social understanding in the preschool years, few studies explore this relationship in middle childhood. Within the context of a prospective longitudinal study of a representative community sample of families (subsample n = 207, mean age = 82.88 months), we investigated concurrent associations between mothers’ internal state language and aspects of 7‐year‐olds’ social understanding, including children’s understanding of belief and spontaneous references to internal states during free play. When sociodemographic, maternal, and child characteristics were controlled, mothers’ references to their own cognitions were associated with dimensions of children’s social understanding. Our findings suggest that exposure to others’ perspectives contributes to children’s advanced understanding of minds, which has implications for interventions that foster social understanding.

Codification method and Categories of Content of the Baby-directed Maternal Speech

Abstract The maternal speech oriented to the baby has been widely studied due to its importance for the child’s development. In this article we present a research method and a set of content categories of maternal speech directed to the child. This methodological proposal is based on a survey of 80 dyads of mothers and babies, with and without postpartum depression (PPD). The distribution of frequency of the categories was similar in both groups. There was no statistical difference in the means of categories for mothers with and without PPD, indicating that there is no change in speech style due to maternal depression. In our view, these categories could be applied to study the speech of both healthy mothers and those with postpartum depression.

Maternal and paternal infant-directed speech in the family culture of first- and second-born infants

ABSTRACT We compared the structure and the content of mothers’ and fathers’ infant-directed speech as a function of infant birth order. Seven first-born and four second-born infants were video-recorded during their natural dyadic interactions with their mothers and fathers at home from the second to the sixth month after birth at 15-day intervals. Microanalysis of parental speech according to infant birth order revealed structural variations, qualitative and quantitative differences that indicate patterns of complementarity and, stability with mother and father. These results are discussed in relation to the psychobiological theory of intersubjectivity and of the complementary, intimate and trusted company and care both parents give to the developing personality of infants.

Maternal discourse continuity and infants' actions organize 12-month-olds' language exposure during object play.

Infant language learning depends on the distribution of co-occurrences within language-between words and other words-and between language content and events in the world. Yet infant-directed speech is not limited to words that refer to perceivable objects and actions. Rather, caregivers' utterances contain a range of syntactic forms and expressions with diverse attentional, regulatory, social, and referential functions. We conducted a distributional analysis of linguistic content types at the utterance level, and demonstrated that a wide range of content types in maternal speech can be distinguished by their distribution in sequences of utterances and by their patterns of co-occurrence with infants' actions. We observed free-play sessions of 38 12-month-old infants and their mothers, annotated maternal utterances for 10 content types, and coded infants' gaze target and object handling. Results show that all content types tended to repeat in consecutive utterances, whereas preferred transitions between different content types reflected sequences from attention-capturing to directing and then descriptive utterances. Specific content types were associated with infants' engagement with objects (declaratives, descriptions, object names), with disengagement from objects (talk about attention, infant's name), and with infants' gaze at the mother (affirmations). We discuss how structured discourse might facilitate language acquisition by making speech input more predictable and/or by providing clues about high-level form-function mappings.

Bilingual Preschoolers’ Speech is Associated with Non-Native Maternal Language Input

ABSTRACT Bilingual children are often exposed to non-native speech through their parents. Yet, little is known about the relation between bilingual preschoolers’ speech production and their speech input. The present study investigated the production of voice onset time (VOT) by Dutch-German bilingual preschoolers and their sequential bilingual mothers. The findings reveal an association between maternal VOT and bilingual children’s VOT in the heritage language German as well as in the majority language Dutch. By contrast, no input-production association was observed in the VOT production of monolingual German-speaking children and monolingual Dutch-speaking children. The results of this study provide the first empirical evidence that non-native and attrited maternal speech contributes to the often-observed linguistic differences between bilingual children and their monolingual peers.

Constructive-semantic Characteristics of Mother’s Speech as a Factor of Child’s Speech Development

Important characteristics of normal mental development of a child are the characteristics of his speech, vocabulary, mastery of grammatical constructions. According to the peculiarities of speech, one can judge the ability of a person to reflect not only the external, perceived properties of objects, but also internal, significant correlations and relationships. In our work, we call these properties constructive and semantic characteristics of speech. The child’s speech develops only in interaction with the people around him, the main figure of which is the mother. The aim of the study was to determine how the constructive and semantic characteristics of the mother’s speech influence the development of the child’s speech, vocabulary and speech activity. The study involved 30 children aged 6.5–7.5 years and their mothers. For diagnostics, the subtest ‘Dictionary’ of the WISC test was used. The traditional method of determining the level of speech development was supplemented by indicators of constructive-semantic characteristics (speech activity, propensity to use different speech structures associated with speech development levels, use of each of the four types of constructions in accordance with the stages of verbal development). Significant connections between individual indicators ofthe speech of the child and his mother were revealed. Relations allow us to talk about the constructive and semantic characteristics of adult speech as a factor in the development of the child’s speech. The study made it possible to reveal the mechanism of the implicit formation of concepts in the child by generalizing a largenumber of situational descriptions and features perceived from verbal judgments of the mother. Speech activity of children decreases in the conditions of primary use by the mother of speech structures ‘action with the object’, ‘functional purpose of the objects’. The results obtained make it possible to consider the constructive-semantic characteristics of maternal speech as a factor of the zone of the nearest developmentof the child’s speech.
 Keywords: speech development, factors of speech development, speech activity, zone of proximal development, speech behavior as a joint action, constructive semantic characteristics of speech, levels of speech development

Emotion Attribution in Nonverbal Vocal Communication Directed to Preterm Infants

The first weeks of life for preterm babies are critical for bonding and attachment. Early vocal contact, as a family based intervention, engages mothers to speak and to sing to their preterm infants in the incubators. This study tested the emotional and smiling content of the mother’s speaking and singing voice in a context of early contact with her newborn preterm infant in the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU), and it examines which acoustic parameters are associated with emotion attributed to the mother’s voice. The main hypothesis is that the emotional content of maternal speech and song, when directed to their preterm infants placed in incubators, is modulated by the infants’ behaviors. Thirty-two blocks of vocal extracts in the presence and absence of preterm infants’ displays and in the 5 s preceding each display were presented to 31 adult naive listeners who were asked to rate the degree of emotion and smile in the mother’s voice. The present results show that when infants open the eyes or smile, the maternal voice is perceived as more emotional and more smiling than it is in the absence of any facial display. This effect is particularly evident in the maternal speech. The maternal voice is rated as more smiling in the presence of the infant’s smile than when preterm infants opened the eyes. The main acoustical features of the infant-directed voice—mean pitch and perceived sound pressure level—are positively associated with smiling attribution while only the mean pitch is associated with emotional intensity. These findings extends prior evidences by showing that maternal ID speech and songs, even in at-risk conditions such as prematurity, are not only related to preterm infant behavior, but also bear emotional content. Early face-to-face interactions between mothers and preterm infants need to be encouraged in the NICU and investigated, especially neural correlates, to assess the impact of emotional infant-directed voices on preterm infants’ brain development.

Personal pronoun usage in maternal input to infants at high vs. low risk for autism spectrum disorder.

Children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) are prone to personal pronoun difficulties. This paper investigates maternal input as a potential contributing factor, focusing on an early developmental stage before ASD diagnosis. Using Quigley and McNally's (2013) corpus of maternal speech to infants (3-19 months; N = 19) who are either at high or low risk for a diagnosis of ASD (Quigley & McNally, 2013), we asked whether mothers used fewer pronouns with high-risk infants. Indeed, high-risk infants heard fewer second-person pronouns relative to their names than low-risk infants. We further investigated the contexts in which mothers were using infants' names. Our results indicated that mothers of high-risk infants often used the infants' names simply to get their attention by calling them. We suggest that high-risk infants may thus hear relatively fewer pronouns because their mothers spend more time trying to get their attention. This may be related to differences in social-communicative behavior between low-risk and high-risk infants.

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.

Structural variations, quantitative differences and similarities between maternal and paternal infant-directed speech

ABSTRACTWe compared systematically the structure, the focus, the thematic sequences, the complexity and the syntactic properties between maternal and paternal infant-directed speech in engagements of infants with their mothers and fathers. Eleven mother–infant and 11 father–infant dyads were video-recorded during their natural interactions at home from the second to the sixth month after birth. Micro-analysis of maternal and paternal infant-directed speech within well-defined units and subunits of analysis revealed: (a) structural variations that gave a higher index of more and shorter in duration units and subunits in father–infant, compared to mother–infant, interactions; (b) quantitative differences that favour mother–infant interactions in the content of focused infant-directed speech; and (c) quantitative similarity of maternal and paternal references to infant emotions and ‘sharing’. These results are discussed in the frame of the theory of innate intersubjectivity and of the company and care both parents give to developing infants.

Maternal verbal responsiveness and directiveness: consistency, stability, and relations to child early linguistic development.

Maternal responsive and directive speech to children at ages 0;10 and 2;0 was investigated by applying a procedure first introduced by Flynn and Masur (2007) to a new language community (Finnish). The issues examined were consistency and stability over time, and also the role of responsiveness and directiveness in child linguistic development at 1;0 and 2;6. The measures of maternal speech from each age were used to predict the results of the subsequent linguistic assessment. Negative correlations between responsive and directive utterances were found at both ages. The frequencies of responsive utterances and supportive directives increased over time. Responsiveness was positively, and intrusive directiveness negatively, related to child early comprehensive skills and the use of symbolic actions and communicative gestures. By contrast, no relations were found between responsiveness and directiveness and children's later linguistic capacities.

Prevalence and Parental Risk Factors for Speech Disability Associated with Cleft Palate in Chinese Children-A National Survey.

Although the prevalence of oral clefts in China is among the highest worldwide, little is known about the prevalence of speech disability associated with cleft palate in Chinese children. The data for this study were collected from the Second China National Sample Survey on Disability, and identification of speech disability associated with cleft palate was based on consensus manuals. Logistic regression was used to estimate odds ratios (ORs) and 95% confidence intervals (CIs). A weighted number of 112,070 disabled children affected by cleft palate were identified, yielding a prevalence of 3.45 per 10,000 children (95% CI: 3.19–3.71). A history of speech disability in the mother (OR = 20.266, 95% CI 5.788–70.959, p < 0.0001), older paternal child-bearing age (OR = 1.061, 95% CI 1.017–1.108, p = 0.0065, per year increase in age), and lower parental education (maternal: OR = 3.424, 95% CI 1.082–10.837, p = 0.0363; paternal: OR = 2.923, 95% CI 1.245–6.866, p = 0.0138) were strongly associated with risk of speech disability associated with cleft palate in the offspring. Our results showed that maternal speech disability, older paternal child-bearing age, and lower levels of parental education were independent risk factors for speech disability associated with cleft palate for children in China. These findings may have important implications for health disparities and prevention.

P22.03: Fetal speech movement response comparing the intravaginal emission of music and maternal speech

P22.03: Fetal speech movement response comparing the intravaginal emission of music and maternal speech

Prosodic differences between declaratives and interrogatives in infant-directed speech.

In many languages, declaratives and interrogatives differ in word order properties, and in syntactic organization more broadly. Thus, in order to learn the distinct syntactic properties of the two sentence types, learners must first be able to distinguish them using non-syntactic information. Prosodic information is often assumed to be a useful basis for this type of discrimination, although no systematic studies of the prosodic cues available to infants have been reported. Analysis of maternal speech in three Standard American English-speaking mother-infant dyads found that polar interrogatives differed from declaratives on the patterning of pitch and duration on the final two syllables, but wh-questions did not. Thus, while prosody is unlikely to aid discrimination of declaratives from wh-questions, infant-directed speech provides prosodic information that infants could use to distinguish declaratives and polar interrogatives. We discuss how learners could leverage this information to identify all question forms, in the context of syntax acquisition.