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

Abstract

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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“…In a study of the interactions of 5-month-old infants and their mothers, Nguyen et al [39] also examined turn-taking behaviour in conjunction with fNIRS recording of interbrain synchrony. They found that turn-taking behaviour was related to the interpersonal brain synchrony in the interaction, and also to the infant's later vocabulary size at 24 months of age.…”

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“…Mothers, being reliable informants, offer tailored information (Csibra & Gergely, 2009;Outters et al, 2020), aligning with children's interests (Ackermann et al, 2020(Ackermann et al, , 2023Madhavan & Mani, 2023). Maternal interactions foster neural synchrony, coordinating gestures and words, enhancing learning opportunities (Leong et al, 2017;Nguyen et al, 2022;Piazza et al, 2020). Children may therefore similarly attend to objects sampled by their mothers and themselves, yielding no differences across trials.…”