Learning how to learn from social feedback: The origins of early vocal development

Abstract

Infants’ prelinguistic vocalizations reliably organize vocal turn‐taking with social partners, creating opportunities for learning to produce the sound patterns of the ambient language. This social feedback loop supporting early vocal learning is well‐documented, but its developmental origins have yet to be addressed. When do infants learn that their non‐cry vocalizations influence others? To test developmental changes in infant vocal learning, we assessed the vocalizations of 2‐ and 5‐month‐old infants in a still‐face interaction with an unfamiliar adult. During the still‐face, infants who have learned the social efficacy of vocalizing increase their babbling rate. In addition, to assess the expectations for social responsiveness that infants build from their everyday experience, we recorded caregiver responsiveness to their infants’ vocalizations during unstructured play. During the still‐face, only 5‐month‐old infants showed an increase in vocalizing (a vocal extinction burst) indicating that they had learned to expect adult responses to their vocalizations. Caregiver responsiveness predicted the magnitude of the vocal extinction burst for 5‐month‐olds. Because 5‐month‐olds show a vocal extinction burst with unfamiliar adults, they must have generalized the social efficacy of their vocalizations beyond their familiar caregiver. Caregiver responsiveness to infant vocalizations during unstructured play was similar for 2‐ and 5‐month‐olds. Infants thus learn the social efficacy of their vocalizations between 2 and 5 months of age. During this time, infants build associations between their own non‐cry sounds and the reactions of adults, which allows learning of the instrumental value of vocalizing.

Caregiver reactions to babbling organize turn‐taking interactions: Facilitative effects of vocal versus non‐vocal responses

“…Adult utterances are shorter in conversational turn‐taking than in a monologue (Marklund et al., 2015). By 5 months, infants expect social responses to their vocalizations (Elmlinger et al., 2022). Our results suggested that 9‐month‐old infants, when babbling, might have developed an expectation for rapid responses in interactions built from experiences with caregivers.…”

Lexical development in an Indonesian-Balinese bilingual child

“…Language acquisition in children usually progresses through a series of phases from one developmental milestone to the next, increasing the complexity, fluency, and consistency of the language. Early vocal development occurs in a sequential manner, resulting in the development of our complex human speaking capability which caused by social input (Cychosz, et al, 2021;Elmlinger et al, 2022;Ramírez-Esparza et al, 2017;Zhang & Ghazanfar, 2018). Regardless of the underlying theoretical language frameworks or explanatory models, agreement exists that it all begins with the first cry, followed by the production of vegetative and quasi-resonant noises until the first cooing sounds appear at about three months of age (Lang et al, 2019).…”

Contingency and synchrony: interactional pathways towards attentional control and intentional communication

“…An influential view has been that intentional communication develops through a four-step process of internalisation (Bruner, 1974;Vygotskij & John-Steiner, 1979) (note that these ideas are relatively compatible with the neurocomputational associative accounts we described in section 4). This type of model has been used to explain how infants learn to use pointing (Begus & Southgate, 2018;Kidd & Holler, 2009;Kovács et al, 2014;Wu & Gros-Louis, 2014) and vocalisations to communicate (Elmlinger et al, 2023;Ghazanfar & Zhang, 2016;Gros-Louis et al, 2006;. Can it also explain the emergence of intentional communication through gaze?…”