Vocal imitation between mothers and infants

Athari, Pegah; Dey, Rajib; Rvachew, Susan

doi:10.1016/j.infbeh.2021.101531

Cited by 12 publications

(10 citation statements)

References 34 publications

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“…This literature, reviewed by Vihman [27], cites a longstanding recognition of the existence of endogenous vocalization in infancy and suggests that although vocal interaction plays an important role in the development of speech, much if not most of the vocal activity of human infants is neither imitative nor even socially interactive. Findings that are being further emphasized recently indicate that immediate vocal imitation occurs rarely, estimated as including not more than ~5% of vocal events in human infants during the first year, and there is reason to believe the amount may be considerably lower, given the difficulty of discerning who is imitating whom in sequences where infants and mothers interchange similar sounds [28][29][30]. It is well established based on recent work that mothers vocally imitate infants far more than the reverse, but even mothers imitate only a small minority of infant sounds in face-to-face interaction [28].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Findings that are being further emphasized recently indicate that immediate vocal imitation occurs rarely, estimated as including not more than ~5% of vocal events in human infants during the first year, and there is reason to believe the amount may be considerably lower, given the difficulty of discerning who is imitating whom in sequences where infants and mothers interchange similar sounds [28][29][30]. It is well established based on recent work that mothers vocally imitate infants far more than the reverse, but even mothers imitate only a small minority of infant sounds in face-to-face interaction [28].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Perspectives on the origin of language: Infants vocalize most during independent vocal play but produce their most speech-like vocalizations during turn taking

et al. 2022

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A growing body of research emphasizes both endogenous and social motivations in human vocal development. Our own efforts seek to establish an evolutionary and developmental perspective on the existence and usage of speech-like vocalizations (“protophones”) in the first year of life. We evaluated the relative occurrence of protophones in 40 typically developing infants across the second-half year based on longitudinal all-day recordings. Infants showed strong endogenous motivation to vocalize, producing vastly more protophones during independent vocal exploration and play than during vocal turn taking. Both periods of vocal play and periods of turn-taking corresponded to elevated levels of the most advanced protophones (canonical babbling) relative to periods without vocal play or without turn-taking. Notably, periods of turn taking showed even more canonical babbling than periods of vocal play. We conclude that endogenous motivation drives infants’ tendencies to explore and display a great number of speech-like vocalizations, but that social interaction drives the production of the most speech-like forms. The results inform our previously published proposal that the human infant has been naturally selected to explore protophone production and that the exploratory inclination in our hominin ancestors formed a foundation for language.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Perspectives on the origin of language: Infants vocalize most during independent vocal play but produce their most speech-like vocalizations during turn taking

et al. 2022

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“…Even though call overlapping is discussed as an important communicative signal in several species [54], mostly, overlap avoidance is discussed in relation to optimized human communication (e.g.,[7]). Vocal matching and vocal imitation in human-mother infant interactions occurs less often [55] and seem to be more relevant for mother-infant musical interactions [56]. Overlap avoidance becomes even more important when infants start to speak their first words, implicating infants’ inhibitory and predictive abilities to coordinate with others as relevant for infants’ language development [10].…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Your turn, my turn. Neural synchrony in mother-infant proto-conversation

Nguyen

Zimmer

Hoehl

2022

Preprint

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Even before infants utter their first words, they engage in highly coordinated vocal exchanges with their caregivers. During these so-called proto-conversations, caregiver-infant dyads use a presumably universal communication structure - turn-taking, which has been linked to favourable developmental outcomes. However, little is known about potential mechanisms involved in early turn-taking. Previous research pointed to interpersonal synchronisation of brain activity between adults and preschool-aged children during turn-taking. Here, we assessed caregivers and infants at 4-6 months of age (N=55) during a face-to-face interaction. We used functional-near infrared spectroscopy hyperscanning to measure dyads' brain activity and microcoded their turn-taking. We also measured infants' inter-hemispheric connectivity as an index for brain maturity and later vocabulary size and attachment security as developmental outcomes potentially linked to turn-taking. The results showed that more frequent turn-taking was related to interpersonal neural synchrony, but the strength of the relation decreased over the course of the proto-conversation. Importantly, turn-taking was positively associated with infant brain maturity and later vocabulary size, but not with later attachment security. Taken together, these findings shed light on mechanisms facilitating preverbal turn-taking and stress the importance of emerging turn-taking for child brain and language development.

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“…Specular activity between interacting individuals is thought to be a mechanism contributing to the formation of social bonds, especially between caregivers and their offsprings. Mother-child dyads observation, for instance, revealed that mothers actually imitate their infants’ facial gestures and vocalizations to a greater extent than infants imitate their parents ( Jones, 2006 ; Athari et al, 2021 ). Parental imitative behaviors offer a form of reward-based learning for infants that may reinforce the elaboration of early learned associations between the self-generated motor sequences and the resulting perceptual outcomes—visual outcomes for imitative facial gestures but also auditory outcomes for vocal imitation—in the other person.…”

Section: Homo Imitans? Methodological and Theoretical Controversiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Faces and Voices Processing in Human and Primate Brains: Rhythmic and Multimodal Mechanisms Underlying the Evolution and Development of Speech

2022

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While influential works since the 1970s have widely assumed that imitation is an innate skill in both human and non-human primate neonates, recent empirical studies and meta-analyses have challenged this view, indicating other forms of reward-based learning as relevant factors in the development of social behavior. The visual input translation into matching motor output that underlies imitation abilities instead seems to develop along with social interactions and sensorimotor experience during infancy and childhood. Recently, a new visual stream has been identified in both human and non-human primate brains, updating the dual visual stream model. This third pathway is thought to be specialized for dynamics aspects of social perceptions such as eye-gaze, facial expression and crucially for audio-visual integration of speech. Here, we review empirical studies addressing an understudied but crucial aspect of speech and communication, namely the processing of visual orofacial cues (i.e., the perception of a speaker’s lips and tongue movements) and its integration with vocal auditory cues. Along this review, we offer new insights from our understanding of speech as the product of evolution and development of a rhythmic and multimodal organization of sensorimotor brain networks, supporting volitional motor control of the upper vocal tract and audio-visual voices-faces integration.

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Vocal imitation between mothers and infants

Cited by 12 publications

References 34 publications

Perspectives on the origin of language: Infants vocalize most during independent vocal play but produce their most speech-like vocalizations during turn taking

Perspectives on the origin of language: Infants vocalize most during independent vocal play but produce their most speech-like vocalizations during turn taking

Your turn, my turn. Neural synchrony in mother-infant proto-conversation

Faces and Voices Processing in Human and Primate Brains: Rhythmic and Multimodal Mechanisms Underlying the Evolution and Development of Speech

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