Infant sensorimotor synchronisation to speech and non-speech rhythms: A longitudinal study

Abstract

Impaired sensorimotor synchronisation (SMS) to acoustic rhythm may be a marker of atypical language development. Here, Motion Capture was used to assess gross motor rhythmic movement at six timepoints between five- and 11-months-of-age. Infants were recorded drumming to acoustic stimuli of varying linguistic and temporal complexity: drumbeats, repeated syllables and nursery rhymes. Longitudinal analyses revealed that whilst infants could not yet reliably synchronise their movement to auditory rhythms, they showed improvement in tempo matching with age. Their ability to decelerate from their spontaneous motor tempo, to better accord with the in-coming tempo, also improved with age. Further, infants became more regular drummers with age, with marked decreases in the variability of spontaneous motor tempo and variability in response to drumbeats. This latter effect was subdued in response to linguistic stimuli. The current work lays the foundation for using individual differences in SMS in infancy to predict later language outcomes.

Longitudinal changes in infants' rhythmic arm movements during rattle-shaking play with mothers

“…Our finding of an increase in the frequency of rattling in the second half of the first year of life suggests that older infants can execute rattling movements with more ease. This is in line with a previous study, which recently showed that infants' movements during drumming become faster and more regular with age (Rocha et al, 2021a). We also observed a developmental increase in the infants' between-arms coherence, which shows that arm movements become more coupled during rattle-shaking across the first year of life.…”

“…In younger infants, at 10 months of age, these behaviors were not modulated by the presence or absence of a social partner (Rocha and Mareschal, 2017). A similar pattern was observed by Rocha and collaborators (Rocha et al, 2021a) during the drumming task-infants spent a higher proportion of time in rhythmic movement during the non-social trials. The social context seems to also facilitate joint drumming synchronization in preschool children (Kirschner and Tomasello, 2009;Yu and Myowa, 2021).…”

Studying the Developing Brain in Real-World Contexts: Moving From Castles in the Air to Castles on the Ground

“…New approaches allow us to study entrainment between a brain and complex, continuous stimuli as it encounters them in everyday settings. Kalashnikova et al, 2018;Jessen et al, 2019Jessen et al, , 2021Attaheri et al, 2021;Rocha et al, 2021;Menn et al, 2022 Problem 2: Event-boundaries, and the structures of specific experimental events, are generally defined a priori by the experimenter, rather than "on the fly" by the agent embodied in their environment.…”

Assessing Sensorimotor Synchronisation in Toddlers Using the Lookit Online Experiment Platform and Automated Movement Extraction

“…From 5 months-of-age, infants can produce their own SMT via drumming ( Rocha et al, 2021b ) with the tempo and regularity of their drumming increasing over the first 2 years of life. Whilst infants cannot reliably synchronise their movements to music, a longitudinal investigation of infant drumming to nursery rhymes of different tempi suggests that by 11-months-of-age infants are beginning to shift away from their SMT to better match the rate of the song ( Rocha et al, 2021a ). Studies of toddlers evidence good tempo adaptation in older infants, when drumming along with a human and non-human partner ( Kirschner and Tomasello, 2009 ; Yu and Myowa, 2021 ).…”