Vocal interactions at the dawn of communication: The emergence of mutuality and complementarity in mother-infant interaction

Abstract

Continuous interaction of mother and infant in the first weeks and months of an infant's life entrains the infant on many crucial aspects of how to do things together. Contingencies of gaze, vocalizations, and other movements are slowly routinized; this scaffolds directing of attention to each other and the world and gives to such multimodal interactions meaning. It is within these continuous interactions with caregivers that language emerges, starting from the first nonreflexive vocalizations that infants produce. The response that caregivers promptly give to these vocalizations informs infants of their relevance and helps shape them. We explored this systematicity by observing the coupling of infants' and mothers' vocalizations in unconstrained interactions longitudinally. While at three months, mothers seem to answer consistently to any speech related vocalization within the first two seconds, this pattern fades away at six and eight months. What remains stable across age is a structure in which overlapping vocalizations are rare and give way to a sequential pattern of vocal reciprocity-an embryonic turn-taking behavior. Discussion relates this finding to early coordination in other modalities in an attempt to sketch a more holistic account of emerging co-action.

Taking Up an Active Role: Emerging Participation in Early Mother–Infant Interaction during Peekaboo Routines

“…Another possibility could be that the exaggerated use of the Acknowledgment phase might cause increased verbal behavior on behalf of the mother. In concert with recent work on the development of infants' sensitivity to turn-taking (Gratier et al, 2015 ) and complementary roles in vocalization (Leonardi et al, 2017 ) this could lead to infants not vocalizing to avoid overlap with the mother.…”

Language Development From an Ecological Perspective: Ecologically Valid Ways to Abstract Symbols

“…Using an earlier established dialogicity of actions (now-you, now-me) parents establish the same pattern in a vocal domain. This process can be observed from the earliest months, first in the emergent turn-taking structure of actions (e.g., Kaye & Wells, 1980) and then in the vocal modality (Leonardi et al, 2016). In the latter case, we observe a decrease in the probability of overlaps between the ages of 3 and 6 months (Figure 4), which stands in contrast to, for example, progressively coupled structure of gaze in the same age range (increase in the probability of mutual gaze, where instead of the valley, present in Figure 4, we observe a peak at the 0 lag; Nomikou et al, 2016).…”

Multimodal Turn-Taking: Motivations, Methodological Challenges, and Novel Approaches

“…Nomikou et al's [24] study considered only gazing behavior (defined as gaze at interaction partner's face), and used CRQA to confirm a tight synchronization of gazing between infants and their mothers and also show how this changes developmentally from the ages of 3, to 6, to 8 months. Similarly, Leonardi et al [48] applied the same method to the vocalization of behavioral streams and found a systematic lagging of mother's vocalizations after infants' vocal production together with an active avoidance of synchronous vocal behavior by the two actors; that is, first signs of vocal turn-taking.…”

“…We achieved this by simplifying the behavioral coding in the various modalities to a series of binary codes: presence or absence of a given behavior. Using the same corpus as in [24] and [48], we asked whether gazing behavior could be related to vocalizations; in other words, whether there is a systematic relationship in time between the production of any kind of vocalization in one of the actors and gazing in the other.…”

“…To show what the possible outcomes of such analyses could look like, we took 16 dyads of the corpus described in [24] and [48], in which we analyzed unimodal coupling for both gaze and vocalizations, and we extracted an additional behavioral stream: smiles of mother and infant during the interaction. All the behavioral streams were coded from video-recorded diaperchanging sessions by trained coders who annotated the starting and ending times of such behaviors (i.e., gaze-at-face, vocalization, and smile for both actors) in dyads with 3-monthold children.…”