Infants of Chronically Depressed Mothers Learn in Response to Male, But Not Female, Infant-Directed Speech.

Abstract

Previous research using a conditioned-attention paradigm demonstrated that 4-month-old infants of depressed mothers (a) failed to acquire associations when a segment of their mothers' infant-directed (ID) speech signaled the presentation of a smiling face but (b) did acquire associations when a segment of an unfamiliar nondepressed mother's ID speech signaled the face (P. S. Kaplan, J. -A. Bachorowski, M. J. Smoski, & W. J. Hudenko, 2002). In the present study, 5- to 13-month-old infants of depressed mothers failed to acquire associations when either their own mothers' (Experiment 1) or an unfamiliar nondepressed mother's (Experiments 1 and 2) ID speech signaled a face. However, these infants acquired associations when a segment of an unfamiliar nondepressed father's ID speech served as the signal (Experiment 2). One possible explanation of these results is that infants of depressed mothers selectively "tune out" ID speech from their mothers and from other, nondepressed, women.

Infant-directed speech produced by fathers with symptoms of depression: Effects on infant associative learning in a conditioned-attention paradigm

“…As was reviewed above, Kaplan et al (2004) showed that infants of chronically depressed mothers failed to learn in this paradigm in response to ID speech produced by their own depressed mother or an unfamiliar non-depressed mother, but showed better-than-normal learning in response to ID speech produced by an unfamiliar non-depressed father, relative to infants of non-depressed mothers. However, although they were obtained in tests with the infant's own, instead of an unfamiliar fathers', ID speech, the current findings showed that elevated depressive symptoms have similar adverse effects on the learning-promoting properties of fathers' as they do with mothers' ID speech.…”

“…As was mentioned above, this was done to hold constant the procedure used in a prior study that had yielded evidence of significant voice-face associations (Kaplan et al, 2004;Exp. 2).…”

“…Pegg, Werker, and McLeod (1992) found that infants as young as 7 weeks of age preferred both female and male ID over AD speech. Finally, our research showed significant voice-face associations in response to ID speech recorded from non-depressed mothers and fathers (Kaplan et al, 2004).…”

“…Values above zero indicate positive summation, i.e., that speech segments increase looking at the checkerboard pattern. Prior research showed that positive summation does not occur in standard control conditions including random, backward, and no-CS controls (Kaplan et al, 1992;Kaplan et al, 1996), including control conditions involving infants of depressed parents, infants of the ages studied here, and infants tested with maternal or paternal ID speech (Kaplan et al, 2004).…”

Social Lifts Must Go Upstairs: Artificial Input and Mechanisms of Language Acquisition by Children

“…The rich input not only helps children to master morphologically and phonologically rich languages [2] but also provides the psychological comfort and stability [3]. However, little children in many countries lack necessary linguistic input due to the fact that parents either have no time to speak with their kids (that normally happens in the families with a high socio-economic status (henceforth -SES)), or do not correctly understand the importance of such communication (characteristics of the lower SES families).…”