Social Feedback to Infants' Babbling Facilitates Rapid Phonological Learning

Abstract

Infants' prelinguistic vocalizations are rarely considered relevant for communicative development. As a result, there are few studies of mechanisms underlying developmental changes in prelinguistic vocal production. Here we report the first evidence that caregivers' speech to babbling infants provides crucial, real-time guidance to the development of prelinguistic vocalizations. Mothers of 9.5-month-old infants were instructed to provide models of vocal production timed to be either contingent or noncontingent on their infants' babbling. Infants given contingent feedback rapidly restructured their babbling, incorporating phonological patterns from caregivers' speech, but infants given noncontingent feedback did not. The new vocalizations of the infants in the contingent condition shared phonological form but not phonetic content with their mothers' speech. Thus, prelinguistic infants learned new vocal forms by discovering phonological patterns in their mothers' contingent speech and then generalizing from these patterns.

Perceived live interaction modulates the developing social brain

“…Behavioral evidence, however, from both adults (e.g. Okita et al, 2007;Laidlaw et al, 2011) and children (Kuhl et al, 2003;Goldstein and Schwade, 2008;Kirschner and Tomasello, 2009) suggests that live, interactive context significantly alters response to otherwise matched social stimuli. Adult neuroimaging research has begun to identify the neural bases of social interaction (e.g.…”

Vocalization Rate and Consonant Production in Toddlers at High and Low Risk for Autism

“…Under this view, infants' speech production is shaped by caregiver responses, as demonstrated by work showing that infants who receive contingent feedback to their babbles restructure them to include phonological patterns from their caregivers' speech, whereas infants who receive noncontingent feedback do not (Goldstein & Schwade, 2008). In ASD, there are three possible ways that the social feedback loop might be disordered.…”

Developmental Trajectory of Audiovisual Speech Integration in Early Infancy. A Review of Studies Using the McGurk Paradigm

“…Ramsdell-Hudock (2014) suggested that such behaviour may be important for receiving feedback from the caregiver when the infant is engaged in her own vocal production. Infants aged 9.5 months produce more speech-like vocalizations when the parent responds contingently to their babbling (Goldstein & Schwade, 2008). Similarly, 10-month-olds that more frequently switch their att ention between the actor and the object that is being described in a foreign language show bett er non-native phoneme discrimination at the neural level in a mismatch response paradigm (Conboy, Brooks, Meltzoff , & Kuhl, 2015).…”