No abstract

During the first two years of life, human infants produce increasing numbers of speech-like (canonical) syllables. Both basic research on child speech development and clinical work assessing a child's pre-speech capabilities stand to benefit from efficient, accurate, and consistent methods for counting the syllables present in a given infant utterance. To date, there have been only a few attempts to perform syllable counting in infant vocalizations automatically, and thorough comparisons to human listener counts are lacking. We apply four existing, openly available systems for detecting syllabic, consonant, or vowel elements in vocalizations and apply them to a set of infant utterances individually and in combination. With the automated methods, we obtain canonical syllable counts that correlate well enough with trained human listener counts to replicate the pattern of increasing canonical syllable frequency as infants get older. However, agreement between the automated methods and human listener canonical syllable counts is considerably weaker than human listeners' agreement with each other. On the other hand, automatic identification of syllable-like units of any type (canonical and non-canonical both included) match human listeners' judgments quite well. Interestingly, these total syllable counts also increase with infant age.

Co-occupation is the mutual engagement of two people in a shared occupation. Recent research has investigated co-occupational activities during sensitive periods to inform clinical practice. However, there remains a dearth of applied research to bridge gaps between research and practice within salient co-occupational relationships between caregivers and infants. The study applied co-occupational constructs of physicality, emotionality, and intentionality within caregiver–infant dyads across infancy. These constructs were examined in relation to caregiver–infant reciprocity in other domains (i.e., language, motor, and affective) to determine the overlapping features of reciprocal co-occupation with established aspects of reciprocity. Results suggest that as infants transitioned into toddlerhood and became more mobile and intentional in behavior, there were observable changes in caregiver–infant reciprocity. Caregiver utterances, affect, touch, and co-occupation were significantly related within and across time, highlighting the need for more studies to disentangle these relations in reference to infant development.

Date Presented 3/30/2017 Infant–maternal reciprocity may be captured and represented through play. Play construction, purpose, object choice, and type were observed and coded using a retrospective analysis, demonstrating an increase in frequency and duration in most categories. Primary Author and Speaker: Bryan Gee Additional Authors and Speakers: Susan Kunkel Contributing Authors: Hillary Swann, Nancy Devine, Nicholas Burgett, Nicki Aubuchon-Endsley, Michele R. Brumley, Heather Ramsdell-Hudock

Seeking roots of language, we probed infant facial expressions and vocalizations. Both have roles in language, but the voice plays an especially flexible role, expressing a variety of functions and affect conditions with the same vocal categories—a word can be produced with many different affective flavors. This requirement of language is seen in very early infant vocalizations. We examined the extent to which affect is transmitted by early vocal categories termed “protophones” (squeals, vowel-like sounds, and growls) and by their co-occurring facial expressions, and similarly the extent to which vocal type is transmitted by the voice and co-occurring facial expressions. Our coder agreement data suggest infant affect during protophones was most reliably transmitted by the face (judged in video-only), while vocal type was transmitted most reliably by the voice (judged in audio-only). Voice alone transmitted negative affect more reliably than neutral or positive affect, suggesting infant protophones may be used especially to call for attention when the infant is in distress. By contrast, the face alone provided no significant information about protophone categories. Indeed coders in VID could scarcely recognize the difference between silence and voice when coding protophones in VID. The results suggest that partial decoupling of communicative roles for face and voice occurs even in the first months of life. Affect in infancy appears to be transmitted in a way that audio and video aspects are flexibly interwoven, as in mature language.