Maternal Sensitivity and the Learning‐Promoting Effects of Depressed and Nondepressed Mothers' Infant‐Directed Speech

Abstract

The hypothesis that aspects of current mother-infant interactions predict an infant's response to maternal infant-directed speech (IDS) was tested. Relative to infants of non-depressed mothers, those of depressed mothers acquired weaker voice-face associations in response to their own mothers' IDS in a conditioned-attention paradigm, although this was partially attributable to demographic differences between the two groups. The extent of fundamental frequency modulation (ΔF 0 ) in maternal IDS was smaller for infants of depressed than non-depressed mothers, but did not predict infant learning. However, Emotional Availability Scale ratings of maternal sensitivity, coded from videotapes of mothers and infants engaged in a brief play interaction, were significant predictors of infant learning, even after maternal depression, its demographic correlates, and antidepressant medication use had been taken into account. These findings are consistent with a role for experience-dependent processes in determining IDS's effects on infant learning. KeywordsMaternal sensitivity; postpartum depression; infant learning; IDS; conditioned-attention paradigm Postpartum depression occurs in about 13% of new mothers (O'Hara, Neunaber & Zekoski, 1984) and is associated reduced sensitivity, synchrony, and reciprocity during interactions with infants (Cohn, Campbell, Matias, & Hopkins, 1990;Field, Healy, Goldstein, & Guthertz, 1990), as well as elevated risk for later problems in cognitive and socio-emotional development (Cicchetti, Rogosch, & Toth, 2002;Murray, Fiori-Cowley, Hooper, & Cooper, 1996, Teti, Gelfand, Messinger, & Isabella, 1995. Indeed, many of the effects of caregiver depression on child development appear to be mediated by maternal insensitivity and relatively lower quality infant-directed stimulation (Murray, 1992;Teti et al., 1995). One type of maternal stimulation affected by depression is infant-directed speech (IDS).Caregivers normally exaggerate prosodic cues and otherwise simplify their speech towards infants (Jacobsen, Boersma, Fields, & Olson, 1983; Snow, 1972), but depressed mothers' IDS has relatively lower pitch modulation (Bettes, 1988;Kaplan, Bachorowski, Smoski, & Zinser, 2001;Zlochower & Cohn, 1996). A series of experiments using a conditionedattention paradigm (reviewed below) has shown that, although IDS normally serves as a "priming" stimulus to facilitate infant associative learning (Kaplan, Jung, Ryther, & Kirk, 1996), IDS produced by depressed mothers is relatively ineffective (Kaplan, Bachorowski, & Zarlengo-Strouse, 1999). Moreover, although 4-month-old infants of depressed mothers learn well in response to IDS produced by unfamiliar non-depressed mothers, older infants of more chronically depressed mothers show poor learning in response to IDS produced by non-depressed as well as depressed mothers (Kaplan, Dungan, & Zinser, 2004), suggesting an experience-based change in responsiveness to maternal IDS. The purpose of the current study was to test the hypothesis that one aspect mother-inf...

Fine-grained variation in caregivers’ /s/ predicts their infants’ /s/ category

“…Two measurements served as proxies for general clarity of speech: Rate of speech and vowel space size (the area circumscribed by /i,a,u/ in F1 Â F2 space) which correlate highly with intelligibility (e.g., Picheny et al, 1985;Bradlow et al, 1996). Measurements of average pitch and size of pitch excursions were carried out as proxies for quality of infantdirected speech or affectivity (e.g., Grieser and Kuhl, 1988;Kaplan et al, 2009). The specific prediction was that infants whose caregivers' peak location for /s/ was higher would have better discrimination scores.…”

The effects of exposure to dynamic expressions of affect on 5-month-olds’ memory

“…More broadly, research also reveals that emotional abuse and neglect have profound effects on children's recognition of affect, their development of memory, and their broader cognitive development (e.g., Pollak, Cicchetti, Hornung, & Reed, 2000;Pollak, Messner, Kistler, & Cohn, 2009;Shackman & Pollak, 2005). Finally, research also demonstrates that infants raised by a mother with depression show impaired memory, impaired associative learning, and delayed cognitive development (e.g., Kaplan, Burgess, Sliter, & Moreno, 2009;Kaplan, Danko, Diaz, & Kalinka, 2011). Thus while much is known regarding adults and children's memories for emotional events (see Blaney, 1986 for a review) including the broader effects of physical and emotional abuse on early memory and cognitive development, little is known about the effects of emotion at the time of encoding on children's or infants' visual recognition memory.…”

Maternal depression and the learning-promoting effects of infant-directed speech: Roles of maternal sensitivity, depression diagnosis, and speech acoustic cues

“…First, although there was a significant negative correlation between Δ F 0 in maternal IDS samples and mean learning scores for groups of infants of non-depressed mothers who were tested with those samples (Kaplan et al, 1999), several subsequent small sample studies have failed to show significant correlations between Δ F 0 in IDS speech samples and individual infant learning in infants of depressed and non-depressed mothers (Kaplan, Burgess, Sliter, & Moreno, 2009). …”

“…Second, although the learning failures in response to an infant’s own depressed mother’s IDS have been observed consistently in infants ranging in age from 4 to 13 months (Kaplan et al, 1999; Kaplan, Dungan, & Zinser, 2004; Kaplan et al, 2009), learning outcomes for these infants in response to “normal” IDS produced by unfamiliar non-depressed mothers have varied with the chronicity and timing of the infant’s own mother’s depression. In one study, the strength of the associative learning among infants of depressed mothers in response to non-depressed mothers’ IDS was inversely proportion to the postpartum duration of the infant’s own mother’s depression (Kaplan et al, 2004).…”

“…Researchers (Kaplan et al, 2009) trained 5–13-month-olds on a forward pairing arrangement in which their own mother’s IDS signaled a smiling female face, and separately assessed the quality of mother–infant interactions during a 10-m semi-structured play session. Videotapes of play sessions coded by blind raters using the Emotional Availability Scales (EAS; Biringen, Robinson, & Emde, 1993; Emde, 1980) showed that, relative to non-depressed controls, depressed mothers were significantly lower in sensitivity and significantly higher in (covert) hostility.…”