Infant‐directed speech to infants at risk for dyslexia: A novel cross‐dyad design

Abstract

When mothers speak to infants at risk for developmental dyslexia, they do not hyperarticulate vowels in their infant‐directed speech (IDS). Here, we used an innovative cross‐dyad design to investigate whether the absence of vowel hyperarticulation in IDS to at‐risk infants is a product of maternal infant‐directed behavior or of infants’ parent‐directed cues. Interactions between mothers and infants who were at risk or not at risk for dyslexia were recorded in three conditions: when mothers interacted with (a) their own infants, (b) infants who were not their own but of the same risk status, and (c) infants who were not their own and of the opposite risk status. This design revealed both infant and parent effects. Mothers of not‐at‐risk infants hyperarticulated vowels significantly more when speaking to not‐at‐risk than to at‐risk infants. In contrast, mothers of at‐risk infants hyperarticulated vowels significantly less than NAR mothers, and this was irrespective of infant status. Mothers of not‐at‐risk infants thus adjusted their IDS to the infant's risk status, while mothers of at‐risk infants did not. We suggest that IDS is determined reciprocally by characteristics of both partners in the dyad: Both infant and maternal factors are essential for the vowel hyperarticulation component of IDS.

Acoustic features of infant-directed speech to infants with hearing loss

“…Thus, it would appear that mothers unconsciously adjust their vowel production to the level of their infants' linguistic competence. This is in line with studies that have demonstrated that maternal speech clarity manifested in the degree of vowel hyperarticulation is modulated by infant response to the mother (Kalashnikova et al, , 2020Lam & Kitamura, 2010).…”

Natural Infant-Directed Speech Facilitates Neural Tracking of Prosody

“…Leong et al (2017) showed that the enhancement of prosodic amplitude modulations in IDS decreases when mothers are talking to older infants. These changes in IDS may be tied to infants' increased linguistic knowledge, as parents were shown to use more prototypically infant-directed speech when talking to infants with lower language abilities (Bohannon & Marquis, 1977;Kalashnikova et al, 2020;Reissland & Stephenson, 1999). Importantly, speech tracking was shown to increase with linguistic knowledge (Chen et al, 2020;Choi et al, 2020), meaning that infants' tracking may rely less on acoustic cues in IDS as their linguistic knowledge increases.…”

Brains in Sync: Practical Guideline for Parent–Infant EEG During Natural Interaction

“…See for example, the MACY system that distinguishes between ‘positive and negative parenting’ based on a large set of maternal, infant, and dyadic rating scales for scoring multiple qualitative dimensions of interactive behavior ( Boeve et al, 2019 ), the Coding Interactive Behavior (CIB) for a rating scale of parent, infant, and dyadic affective states and interactive styles ( Feldman, 1998 ; Endevelt-Shapira et al, 2021 ), the Infant regulatory and maternal regulatory scoring system (IRSS and MRSS) for facial affect, direction of gaze, vocalizations, gestures, leaning, touching, self-comforting, distancing and stress ( Weinberg et al, 2008 ), maternal sensitivity and attachment ( Beebe and Steele, 2013 ), and attention, affect, orientation, touch, and composite facial-visual engagement ( Beebe et al, 2016 ). Other interesting (and more basic) parameters during parent–infant interactions can be measured as well: infant-directed speech ( Shruti et al, 2018 ; Kalashnikova et al, 2020 ), infant vocalizations (e.g., cry, fuss, yawn, and positive vocalizations, Feldman et al, 2010b ), and dyadic coordination of gaze ( Northrup and Iverson, 2020 ). These behavioral coding schemes and labels are just a few examples of the enormous number of possibilities that facilitate all kinds of behavioral coding available during parent–infant interaction.…”